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THEsSTOEY-OF 

THOMMA.EDLSON 



FAMOUS AMERICANS 
FOR YOUNG READERS 

Titles Ready 

GEORGE WASHINGTON By Joseph Walker 

JOHN PAUL JONES By C. C. Fraser 

THOMAS JEFFERSON By Gene Stone 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN By J. Walker McSpadden 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN By Clare Tree Major 

DAVID CROCKETT By Jane Corby 

ROBERT FULTON By I. N. McFee 

THOMAS A. EDISON By I. N. McFee 

HARRIET B. STOWE By R. B. MacArthur 

MARY LYON By H. O. Stengel 

Other Titles in Preparation 




© Underwood & Underwood. 

EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY 
Hard at work, on his 7 tth birthday 



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FAMOUS AMERICANS 

For^Youno Reader 

* THE >STOEY • OF + 

J THOMMA.EDLSOIN * 

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* INEZ N.McFEE 



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Copyright, 1922 
BY BARSE & HOPKINS 



PEIlfTED IX THE TT. S. A. 

AUG -2 '22 

©CI.AB77733 



PREFACE 

The life story of Edison abounds in sur- 
prises. Not alone for his achievements, but 
for his indomitable courage and ability to sur- 
mount obstacles does his career read like a 
fairy tale. In his boyhood he was "news 
butcher" on a train, and even then was ex- 
perimenting in chemistry. But his improvised 
laboratory nearly burned up the baggage car, 
and he was thrown out bodily. Later he was 
a tramp telegrapher and earned the reputation 
of being one of the fastest operators who ever 
handled a key. A fortunate chance, for which 
he was ready, enabled him to establish a mod- 
est workshop at Menlo Park, N. J., which in 
the years to come was to grow into the pres- 
ent spacious plant at Orange. Here have 
been produced many marvels, now familiar to 
us all — the incandescent electric light, the 
phonograph, the motion picture, the improved 
storage battery, and literally hundreds of 
other things — and back of them all has been 
the genius of one man. He has been aptly 
called "The Wizard," and many of his dis- 
coveries seem magical, but he himself said 
they were simply the result of "taking pains." 

That we are still only on the threshold of 
many wonderful things is evidenced by Edi- 



PREFACE 

son's own emphatic declaration: "We are just 
emerging from the chimpanzee state men- 
tally. We don't know one-millionth of one 
percent about anything. Why, we don't even 
know what water is. We don't know what 
light is. We don't know what gravitation is. 
We don't know what enables us to keep on 
our feet, to stand up. We don't know what 
electricity is. We don't know what heat is. 
We don't know anything about magnetism. 
We have a lot of hypotheses, but that's all." 
It lies perhaps for some of our readers to 
go on beyond the province of this book, to fol- 
low the great Wizard's zealous, untiring 
course, and to aid perchance in solving the 
mystery of some of these things, which are for 
the most part so common that most of us are 
incapable of recognizing them as problems 
at all. 



CONTENTS 



I. 
II. 

III. 
IV. 

V. 

VI. 

VII. 

VIII. 

IX. 

X. 

XI. 

XII. 



Boyhood Days 

The Young Telegraph Operator 

oljtcroppings of genius 

Experiments in Electrical Teleg 
raphy 

Edison and the Telephone . 

The Story op the Phonograph 

The Electric Light 

The Kinetoscope, or Moving Pic 
ture Machine 



Other Interesting Inventions . 
Edison and His Workmen . 
Edison and the Public . 
Edison in His Home .... 



9 
26 

40 

50 
62 

72 
84 

114 
125 
146 
161 
173 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Edison in His Laboratory 
Hard at work, on his 
7Jf.th birthday 



Frontispiece 



FACING PAGE 



Thomas A. Edison 64 

From a photograph taken 
in early manhood 

The Young Edison and His First Phonograph 80 
From a photograph 

Mr. and Mrs. Edison on an Outing . . . 174 
Showing him on one of the rare 
intervals when he was loafing 



THE STORY OF THOMAS A. 
EDISON 



BOYHOOD DAYS 

The little town of Milan, Ohio, is to-day 
noted chiefly as the birthplace of Thomas Alva 
Edison. But on that cold winter afternoon, 
February 11, 1847, when occurred this event 
which was to have such influence in the lives of 
all mankind, it was a hummingly prosperous 
little grain-market, filled with bursting gran- 
aries which were loaded out to Eastern ports 
by way of the thrifty Milan canal. The 
Edison home stood within close view of the 
busy wharf, and something of its hustle and 
bustle must have communicated itself to the 
soul of the babe. 

"A bonny boy he is," said the good neighbor 
who came to apprise the waiting father of the 
little one's safe arrival. "Fair and sweet, with 
gray eyes — the very image of his mother." 

"Good!" exclaimed Samuel Edison huskily, 



10 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

and his tall spare form seemed to add on an 
inch or two to its six feet. "If he is only like 
her in brains, and temper, too, he will indeed be 
a blessing!" 

And well might the husband and father 
say this. Nancy Elliott, his Scotch-Canadian 
school-teacher wife had never been aught but a 
joy to him. 

Little "Alvie" soon became all that his fond 
father desired. The child seldom cried. His 
temper, "from the moment he could distinguish 
between pleasure and pain, was an angelic one. 
He is said to have cracked jokes when a baby, 
and from the time when he began to take notice 
he was quite conscious of the humorous side of 
a situation." And, as soon as he began to talk, 
he started in on the endless series of Whys 
which were to occupy all his days! About 
the home, down the tow-path to the wharf, 
where he escaped as soon as his toddling legs 
would carry him, he was always meeting a 
Why? And, when those he questioned an- 
swered in sheer desperation, "I do not know!" 
he increased their annoyance by asking, "Well, 
why don't you know?" 

Odd, yes and downright stupid were some of 



THOMAS A. EDISON 11 

those questions, or so it seemed to those who 
failed to fathom his drift, and they thought him 
not quite right mentally — "half-baked," as we 
would term it to-day. And, indeed, some of 
his own efforts at investigation gave truth to 
this; for instance, when he wanted to know 
how goose eggs turned into fluffy little gos- 
lings, and he was found calmly hovering the 
eggs himself, while the old goose hissed her 
angriest. Nearby was cached a supply of 
food for himself, in case the outcome proved 
of long duration ! 

He did not get on well at school. Few 
teachers were able to satisfy his constant 
queries, and they failed to understand him 
through lack of sympathy. Indeed, one almost 
broke the lad's heart by telling the school in- 
spector right before him that there was no use 
trying to explain anything to little Al Edison, 
as the child was "too addled" to understand. 
Home he rushed at top speed and flung him- 
self into his mother's arms, crying out his grief. 
Brave Nancy Edison! Her lips quivered and 
her own eyes filled with tears, for she was hurt 
to the quick and righteously indignant. Brains 
there were in plenty behind that broad fore- 



12 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

head and those clear, questioning gray eyes, 
that she knew very well. Why, the child had 
mastered the alphabet and had learned to read 
almost by his own efforts ! He was filled with 
a strong desire to know things, and he needed 
only to be guided in the right way. Forth- 
with, she determined herself to become his 
teacher. They would read and study together, 
and this she told him in a burst of enthusiasm 
which proved beyond a doubt what a champion 
she could be, 

"My mother was the making of me," says 
Edison. "She was so true, so sure of me, that 
I ever afterward felt that I had some one to 
live for, some one whom I must not disap- 
point." 

About this time the prosperity of the little 
community received its death blow. The Lake 
Shore Railroad had been established ; it missed 
the town of Milan and "killed" the canal. The 
Edisons moved to Port Huron, Michigan, "a 
prosperous town whose chief characteristics 
were bustle and enterprise," and here they set- 
tled in a fine old homestead, in the midst of an 
apple and pear orchard, just at the edge of the 
town. The large roomy house had delightful 



THOMAS A. EDISON 13 

porches, where Al and his mother might always 
be found at certain hours, in pleasant weather, 
hard at work on schoolroom tasks which Mrs. 
Edison assigned and conducted with as much 
regard for rule and punctuality as she would 
have done had her pupils been fifty instead of 
one. And the young lad repaid her well. He 
needed never to be told a thing twice, and no 
lesson was too long or too hard for him. Read- 
ing and writing were soon mastered, but the 
third "R" was a debatable point — Al had no 
head for mathematics, and he would not try to 
learn — a thing, by the way, which he has never 
regretted. "I can always hire mathemati- 
cians," he once said to a friend, "but they can't 
hire me!" Geography, history and English 
were readily approached through the broad 
avenues of reading, the father contributing 
here by giving young Al a substantial reward 
for each new book mastered. Between the 
ages of nine and twelve, the boy had read 
Hume's "History of England," Sear's "His- 
tory of the World," Gibbons's "Rome," "The 
Penny Encyclopedia," and several works on 
electricity and science. 



14 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

But these lessons and associations, happy as 
they were, could not last. Tannie, the sister, 
was continually writing stories and verses and 
spoke quite confidently of the time when she 
should be "an author." Will, the elder brother, 
was exceedingly clever with his pencil and 
there was talk of sending him to Europe for 
an artist's training — a thing, by the way, which 
never materialized. As for Alvie himself, a 
chance book, Parker's "School Philosophy," 
had determined his future career. He would 
be a great chemist and an inventor. All his 
share of the profits for work early and late in 
his father's large market garden went for the 
purchase of experimental supplies. A corner 
of the cellar became his laboratory, and here 
were set up some two hundred or more of the 
bottles he had hunted and begged from all 
quarters. As each one was filled, it was in turn 
labeled "Poison" to insure its safe-keeping, for 
often his mother, resenting the continual en- 
croachments made on her part of the cellar, 
was inclined to "clear out the trash!" 

Presently the boy was familiar with all the 
chemicals obtainable in the small town, and had 
tried to his satisfaction many experiments 



THOMAS A. EDISON 15 

mentioned in his scientific reading. But this 
was not enough; he wanted to dip into other 
things. Just before his vision was the open 
door into analytical chemistry, and why he did 
not become a chemist to the exclusion of every- 
thing else was due perchance to the progressive 
order of the times. Every paper he picked up 
had something to say of the new wonder of 
the world — electricity. What was it? What 
might it not accomplish? Experiments with 
electrical batteries fired the boy with the en- 
thusiasm of discovery. He must know more! 
He must have more money for experimental 
supplies ! With his rich heritage of hustle and 
bustle, he determined to start some enterprise 
to float himself independently, then no one 
could complain of his wasting money, and he 
at once confided the idea to his mother, who, a 
trifle awed by the boy's sureness, asked almost 
timidly what work he thought best suited to his 
qualifications. 

"Well," said young Al, with that character- 
istic largeness and freedom which was always 
his, "it does not matter much what I do, so 
long as the work is honest and brings in the 
cash!" 



16 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

After due deliberation, he decided to sell 
newspapers. And he made known his plans 
with a businesslike directness which argued 
well for his future prosperity. 

"I do not want to hawk papers on the 
street," he said. "Why wouldn't it be a 
good idea to apply for the job of selling on 
the Grand Trunk road between here and 
Detroit?" 

A railway newsboy! His mother's vivid 
imagination at once pictured the train in a 
ditch, and her ambitious offspring lying killed 
and bleeding beneath the debris. But young 
Al laughed away her fears, and soon got her 
to help write out his application. Then, be- 
lieving that "everything comes round to him 
who hustles while he waits," he set about find- 
ing where he could obtain his supplies the most 
advantageously. 

Sure enough, his industry had its reward, 
and Al was the happiest boy in the whole coun- 
try. Needless to say, he was a quick success. 
People liked his bright face and pleasant man- 
ners ; his stock was neat and clean; he had what 
people wanted, and they bought liberally. 

The train left Port Huron about seven in 



THOMAS A. EDISON 17 

the morning and was three hours reaching its 
destination; the return trip began at four- 
thirty p. m. This left young Al with consider- 
able time on his hands in Detroit. It only 
took a few minutes to replenish his supplies; 
so he went over to the public library, where he 
at once determined to read the place through 
in the days while he waited. But, he tells us 
laughingly, in later years, "Other things inter- 
fered before I had done!" 

It was an easy time for a "newsy" to work 
up a trade, but the story of Edison's first coup 
is none the less interesting for all that. It was 
his custom always to drop into the composing 
room of the Detroit Free Press and look over 
the proofs. In this way he could judge how 
many papers to buy. The Civil War was then 
in progress, and one day his quick eye caught 
the news of the terrible disaster at Shiloh. 
Racing around to the telegraph office he 
begged a friendly operator to wire ahead to 
the stations on his line, requesting the agents 
to chalk up on their bulletin boards that papers 
telling about a terrible battle would come in 
on the next train. In return he offered the 
operator newspaper service free for six months. 



18 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Then young Al went back to the news office. 

"I want one thousand papers on trust," he 
said, looking the foreman squarely in the eye. 
"I know I can sell 'em," and he proceeded to 
detail his plan. 

The man heard him through, and then 
clapped the lad heartily on the shoulder. "You 
are a genius, kid," he said. "But you'll have 
to see the boss." 

Upstairs, young Edison asked for fifteen 
hundred papers ! He got them, too, and as he 
said later, "Then I felt happier than I ever 
have since!" 

At the first stop, where he usually sold two 
papers, he sold five hundred. The town had 
turned out en masse! Taking his cue from 
this, at the next station Edison asked ten cents 
per copy, and the price reached twenty-five 
cents before he got to the end of the run! 
Then a few papers remained. He put these in 
a cart and went up by the church where prayer 
meeting was in session. Calling out the news 
of the battle, he soon had the minister and all 
the congregation clamoring about him, bidding 
against one another for the precious sheets. 
He had made a small fortune for a boy, but 



THOMAS A. EDISON 19 

best of all he had shown that he had shrewd 
business sense. 

While waiting around the composing room; 
Al learned to set type. And then he had an- 
other bright idea: he would himself edit and 
publish the Grand Trunk Herald, and thus 
add further to his precious hoard. Securing 
the gift of a quantity of old type, and buying 
for a small sum a press which one of his 
numerous friends had taken on a bad debt, he 
set about realizing this scheme. The result was 
such an interesting little sheet that more than 
once an item from it was copied in the London 
Times! The paper sold readily, and not infre- 
quently through the kindness of his telegrapher 
friends young Al beat the newspapers to an 
important scoop. In four years he had earned 
something like $2,000, which, aside from the 
sum he insisted on paying for his board, went 
the way of all his funds. 

To-day, so far as is known, the only existing 
copy of the Weekly Herald hangs in the 
library of the Edison home. Mrs. Edison has 
proudly had it enclosed in a case-like glass 
frame, and the well-preserved sheet, 12x16 
inches in size, may thus be read on both its 



20 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

interesting sides. It is a pleasing memorial of 
the activities of a fourteen-year-old boy, and 
in spite of a few errors in spelling and English, 
would challenge most youths of the present to 
do as well. 

The Herald and his duties as a newsboy still 
left Edison with a margin of time on his hands. 
True to his thrifty training, he at once turned 
this to account by establishing a laboratory in 
his end of the car. And here, as might have 
been expected, he one day came to grief. A 
bottle of phosphorus jarred from its shelf, and 
igniting at once set fire to the car. The hot- 
headed Irish conductor, incensed at the danger 
to his train, soundly boxed the lad's ears, and 
threw the precious chemicals and apparatus out 
the window. It was a dire calamity, but the 
worst feature was the permanent deafness 
which developed in the boy's right ear, as a 
result of the cuffing, an affliction which no 
amount of surgical skill was ever able to 
remedy, and from which Edison suffered all 
his life, even though he himself regarded it 
philosophically. 

"Broadway is as quiet to me as a country 
village is to a normal person," he once said. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 21 

"While working as a telegrapher, my deafness 
was a distinct advantage. I could hear only 
the instrument on my own table, and I had 
not to contend with the noise that unstrung the 
nerves of the other operators. In like man- 
ner, my deafness helped me in working out the 
telephone transmitter and the phonograph." 
It also helped him to preserve poise all 
through the years by giving him those blessed 
moments of utter relaxation, frequently 
snatched on the job, where sleep would other- 
wise have been impossible. 

Though he never dared reestablish his 
laboratory on the train, young Al was not to be 
discouraged. His spare time was given to 
reading and to mapping out plans for home 
experiments. In time his little corner in the 
cellar came to occupy a very large share of the 
boy's thoughts, for his publishing business 
came to an inglorious end. Following the ill- 
advised counsel of a lad who loved all manner 
Df pranks and mischief, the title of the Herald 
was changed to Paul Pry, and its contents be- 
came mostly "take-offs" of prominent citizens 
and the officials of the road. Whether merited 
or not, these articles were never very well 



22 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

received, and the paper lost heavily in prestige. 
The end came when one irate gentleman cor- 
nered Al, and after telling him exactly what 
he thought of his obnoxious paper, promptly 
took the young editor by the coat collar and the 
slack of his pants and threw him into the canal ! 
As he swam ashore, Al sensibly decided that 
the career of a sensational publisher was unde- 
sirable, and he determined to abandon the busi- 
ness in favor of electricity and telegraphy. 

But the time for the necessary experiments 
to make his work practical grew more and 
more inadequate. He had to be off shortly 
after six in the morning, and he did not get 
home until after eight at night. Moreover, his 
father, a stern disciple of the old maxim, 
"Early to bed and early to rise," stoutly in- 
sisted on his going to bed promptly at nine- 
thirty. Nor was he to be cajoled or tricked; 
such efforts always ended in disaster. What 
was to be done? 

A few evenings later the boy came home 
without his customary supply of reading 
matter. 

"Where are the papers?" asked his father, 
eyeing him disappointedly. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 23 

"We were pretty well sold up," Alvie re- 
turned innocently, "and Dick took what was 
left. I've had 'em aU lately." 

"Was there anything of particular interest?" 

Al mentioned a few topics. "I tell you 
what, father," he said enthusiastically, "I 
might have Dick send in the news as his dad 
reads it aloud. We could all enjoy the paper 
that way!" 

"Hmm!" observed Mr. Edison dubiously. 
He had small faith in Al's telegraphic ability, 
having always regarded as more or less of a 
nuisance the wire between the two homes, which 
the boys had industriously fashioned at odd 
moments, using an old river cable, some stove- 
pipe wire, and glass-bottle insulators. How- 
ever, it was this agency or a mighty dull eve- 
ning; so he followed the lad, without a word, 
even though the heedless old clock cut into the 
procession with its very loudest chime, an- 
nouncing nine-thirty! 

Dick, of course, was all primed and waiting, 
and the news soon began to come in. Indus- 
triously Al scribbled off the items with flying 
fingers and handed the slips to his father as 
fast as each "special" was finished. It was 



24 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

exhilarating business, and for nearly two hours 
Mr. Edison did not once bethink himself about 
the time! 

Al had won. This method of procedure held 
for ten days or more, then the boy took to 
bringing in papers again, and he and Dick 
were left to their own devices. No longer did 
the nine-thirty signal sound an extinguisher in 
their midst ! 

Other boys became interested, and soon half- 
a-dozen or more houses in the neighborhood 
were connected. One of these recruits was 
always rather a duffer at the game. He 
couldn't get the signals over the wire, and he 
would stick his head out the window and yell 
across to know what messages had been sent- — 
a procedure which always roused young Edi- 
son. He took it as a reflection on his telegraph, 
and to be sure the line was not altogether above 
reproach. How could it be, with the crude 
materials with which the small inventor had to 
work? 

One night a stray cow played the part of a 
miniature cyclone among the wires which 
stretched hither and yon across the orchard, 
and the damage was never made good. For 



THOMAS A. EDISON 25 

the principal investor shortly had the oppor- 
tunity of telegraphing without the responsi- 
bility of constructing and keeping up his line. 
But this is another story. 



II 

THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR 

How young Edison became a real teleg- 
rapher, instead of a boy experimenter, is an 
interesting story. AFs train had taken the 
siding for a fast freight, when the boy, step- 
ping out for a breath of fresh air, was horrified 
to see little Jimmie Mackenzie, the station 
master's two-year-old son, come rushing laugh- 
ingly into the path of the oncoming engine. 
It was a matter of seconds, and the quick- 
witted boy sprang for him headlong, while the 
startled onlookers gasped shudderingly as the 
shrieking engine tore by. All felt that the 
brave young newsboy had made the leap in 
vain. But, lo! when the scene cleared there 
was Al on the opposite side of the gravel, with 
the blood running down his face from a cut 
he had received, but with the child safe in his 
arms. Moreover, he was as cool as a cucum- 
ber, and smiled away the father's incoherent 
thanks as he thrust the baby toward him and 

26 



THOMAS A. EDISON 27 

made for his own train, now beginning to 
move. He had but done his duty, and so far 
as Al was concerned the chapter was closed. 

But not so with Mr. Mackenzie. All day 
the circumstance flashed before his eyes, and 
he turned over one after another considerations 
as to how he might in a measure repay the 
young newsy's quick-witted action. At last he 
hit upon the proper thing, and when Al's train 
appeared on the next run he sought the boy 
out. 

"See here," he said earnestly, "how would 
you like to stop off here four nights out of the 
week and study telegraphy with me?" 

"Why — ee — " Al gazed at him in speech- 
less delight, but the eagerness with which he 
grasped the operator's outstretched hand 
served better than words. 

Forthwith began a friendship that ended 
only with the death of the gray-haired agent 
years later. For three months, according to 
schedule, young Edison dropped off at Mt. 
Clemons, and never did a teacher have a more 
absorbed pupil. Not a detail escaped him, and 
presently he knew even more about his sub- 
ject than did his instructor. There was a 



28 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

vacancy as night operator at the Port Huron 
station, and on Mackenzie's recommendation 
young Edison applied for the position, and got 
it. The salary was $25 a month, and seldom 
has there been a happier boy than young Al 
when he made known his good fortune at home. 
He gave up his job on the train at once, and 
set about his new duties with a gay good will. 
Unfortunately, however, the work was not 
very heavy. The boy had but to record the 
passing of trains, and these were so infrequent 
that the time hung heavily on his hands. More- 
over, he soon became desperately sleepy. He 
would not sleep daytimes, as other night oper- 
ators did; for then he would have had to give 
up his beloved shop work, a procedure not to be 
considered even for a moment. So an alarm 
clock was purchased, and set to arouse him 
when trains were due. But sometimes the 
trains were off schedule, and again and again 
Al slept straight through all alarms. The 
despatcher was uneasy, but he liked young 
Edison and was disposed to be lenient. So, 
as a safeguard, he ordered the boy to send in 
the signal "A" every half hour. Al did so, 
albeit he considered the proceeding rather fool- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 29 

ish and that it was up to him to get round it. 
A few nights later he arrived with a small box 
in his pocket, and as soon as he had the office 
to himself, proceeded to connect the rather 
queer looking instrument he had brought by 
wires with the clock and the telegraph. Then 
he sat back with a broad grin and awaited de- 
velopments. Nor had he long to wait. The 
hour hand was almost on the half hour, and at 
exactly that instant one lever of his ingenious 
machine threw open the key and another 
flashed the Morse "A" along to the despatcher. 
The boy's inventive ability had served him 
well ! But lest there be some hitch in the oper- 
ations he drew up a chair and read until an- 
other half hour had gone by. Promptly the 
little "dummy" did its duty, and then young 
Edison, with a boyish salute in the despatcher's 
direction, as promptly composed himself for 
slumber. He had two or three perfectly good 
hours before a train was due. 

All went well for some time. The des- 
patcher, being signaled night after night, so 
promptly on the hour, began to regain confi- 
dence in Thomas A. Edison. There was good 
timber in the boy after all! But murder will 



30 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

always out. One night the despatcher hap- 
pened to be at a neighboring station. He 
thought he would call up young Edison and 
test out his abilities a little. He signaled time 
and again and getting no answer began to fear 
something had gone wrong at Port Huron. 
So he jumped on a hand-car and went down, 
arriving almost on the half-hour. Looking 
in at the window he saw young Edison sound 
asleep. At the same moment, the despatcher *s 
quick eye was attracted to the clock and its 
wired connections, and he stood spellbound 
while the faithful little levers performed their 
valuable services. Then, notwithstanding the 
ingeniousness of the little machine and the 
talent which it undoubtedly revealed, he 
walked in and shook the boy into wakefulness, 
telling him in no uncertain terms that he dared 
not trust him further. There was too much 
danger involved. So, breathless and not a little 
chagrined, young Edison found himself out of 
a job. 

But he could not stay away from the station. 
The telegraph instruments, the wires and their 
complications, drew him as a magnet draws 
steel. So many times did he ferret out trouble 



THOMAS A. EDISON 31 

and right matters that the lineman finally 
threatened to give him a hearty licking if he 
didn't quit trying to undermine his job! 

Finally Edison got back into service as tele- 
graph operator at Sarnia, over the Canadian 
line. As it was day service, there was no dan- 
ger of his sleeping on the job. But there was 
another little fox which he was not proof 
against. His love for mechanical devices, 
short-cuts, would interfere, and one day he let 
a train pass which he should have held, as there 
was another train just ahead. Realizing his 
mistake instantly, he rushed frantically down 
the track in a perfectly useless effort to avert 
the tragedy. Fortunately, however, the engi- 
neers heard one another's whistles and were 
able to stop in time. Young Edison was so 
relieved at this that he did not much dread the 
summons to the chief's office. However, when 
he learned that he really stood in grave danger 
of the penitentiary, he resolved to get away 
while the going was good, and took a "tie- 
pass" at once, presently arriving in Indian- 
apolis, where he found little difficulty in 
securing a job at $75 per month. 

In those days, good telegraph operators 



32 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

were scarce and the ranks of what few skilled 
men the country could boast had been sadly 
depleted by the war. It was a condition which 
bred "tramp" telegraphers, as it offered an 
opportunity to see the country and earn one's 
way en route. And Edison determined to 
make the most of it. In the next few months 
he handled important wires in Memphis, 
Cincinnati, New Orleans and Louisville. One 
who records this period says: "He lived in 
the free-and-easy atmosphere of the tramp 
operators — a boon companion with them, yet 
absolutely refusing to join in their dissipa- 
tions. So highly esteemed was he for his hon- 
esty that when a spree was on hand the others 
asked him to keep their money for them." 

At Louisville, the young operator especially 
distinguished himself by taking press reports. 
He received Andrew Johnson's presidential 
message in just one hour. He then para- 
graphed the copy so that the printers could 
take it in exactly three lines each, thus enabling 
them to set up the whole thing in record time. 
For this valuable service the Louisville press 
gave him a state dinner ! 

On one occasion young Edison arrived on 



THOMAS A. EDISON 33 

the new job looking so much like a veritable 
hayseed that the office force decided to "salt" 
him. Accordingly, a speedy man was duly 
posted, and young Edison seated to take what 
he sent. But "Tom" Edison, as he was now 
called, "Al" and "Alvie" having been left 
behind with his boyhood, was by no means as 
green and easy as he looked! Almost imme- 
diately he sensed what was in the wind, and 
draping the old linen duster, which he wore in 
lieu of a coat, over the back of his chair, he 
took up a pen, examined it carefully, and 
started in about fifty words behind. A broad 
grin spread across the room in his rear, but it 
didn't last long. The machine on the young 
fellow's table began to hum "like an old style 
Singer sewing machine," but "the jay" was 
in no wise flustered. Swiftly and smoothly his 
pen moved across the paper, leaving behind it 
a trail neat and legible as copper-plate; he 
crossed his "t's" and dotted his "i's" and punc- 
tuated carefully, for the copy was to go to the 
press room at once; while the plainly 
numbered sheets flowed from his desk and scat- 
tered like feathers in a gale. Presently the 
Memphis man began to feel his spurt of speed 



34 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

and slowed down, and Edison quickly seized 
his chance. Opening the key instantly, he cut 
in: "Well, get a move on! Maybe you think 
you are running a primer class !" 

A murmur of admiration ran around the 
room. Careless and untidy the newcomer 
might he, but he was no slouch at the board, 
that was certain! He must easily have been 
averaging fifty to fifty-five words per minute, 
and no doubt he could send as rapidly as he 
could receive. Thenceforward not a man there 
but was ready to stand by Tom Edison through 
thick and thin ! 

In Boston, young Edison took a different 
tack. For some time the office had been terri- 
bly pestered by cockroaches, especially in the 
anteroom where the night operators kept their 
lunches. Edison objected to sharing his 
scanty rations with such a villainous horde, 
and, one evening, he proceeded to lay an inge- 
nious trap. By means of some tinfoil and fine 
wire he placed a double "ribbon" around the 
outer edge of the table top where the lunches 
were kept, and then connected up with two 
heavy batteries. News of the proceedings 
went round, and the whole force gathered to 



THOMAS A. EDISON 35 

await results. The cockroaches were exceed- 
ingly clever! They knew to an instant when 
fresh supplies might be depended on, and 
shortly after six-thirty, they always issued like 
a mob of mill operatives, and made a raid on 
the table. Scarcely had young Edison com- 
pleted his work, when the advance guard made 
its appearance, and the robbers came on full 
tilt. Up the table legs they swarmed, each one 
eager to be first, yet keeping in line as good 
scouts should. The trail of ribbons halted the 
advance corporals, but pushed and harried by 
those in the rear, the crossing was attempted. 
Tentative steps on the first ribbon brought no 
dire results, and the second was attempted, 
when presto ! over went the cockroach buddies, 
"as dead as a free message." 

It must not be inferred that Edison had 
become so deeply engrossed in telegraphy as 
to forget his old passion for experimenting. 
On the contrary, to this he owed in part his 
status of "tramp telegrapher." He simply 
could not keep a job. His mind was too much 
occupied with the thousand and one schemes 
he had in hand. He was seldom on time; 
for wherever he worked, he managed somehow 



86 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

to have a shop around the corner. It was nearly 
always past the hour for him to be on duty, 
before he recollected that he really had a 
bread-and-butter job which he could not afford 
to neglect. When hauled over the coals, he 
always expressed his regret and promised to 
reform. But he never did. And he was always 
broke! Books and apparatus, and occasional 
aid to some poor fellow-employee who was out 
of luck, took all his capital. Whenever he 
found himself minus a situation, he was usually 
in such straits, that unless he could secure a 
pass he had to walk to the new field, and when 
this was a matter of a hundred miles or so, it 
was anything but a laughing proposition. 

His quest for supplies often led the young 
experimenter into questionable situations, and 
on one occasion came very near being serious. 
On one occasion, Edison dropped into an 
auction, and to his delight shortly became the 
owner of a great stack of North American 
Reviews, for the small outlay of two dollars. 
They made a sizable bundle, but the young 
man had no money to spend for delivery 
charges, and besides he was already overdue 
at the office. So he carried the load with him, 



THOMAS A. EDISON 37 

and no doubt had much ado to keep his mind 
on his work until he was free. This was about 
three o'clock in the morning. Then, with the 
heavy burden on his shoulder, he set out at a 
great rate for his lodging. As he emerged 
from a dark alley which he had taken as a 
short-cut, his weighted, stumbling appearance 
aroused the suspicion of a policeman, and he 
called out sharply, "Halt, there !" But Edison 
did not hear him, and hastened onward. Con- 
vinced now that it was a burglar making off 
with his loot, the policeman drew his pistol and 
fired, again repeating his command. Edison, 
on account of his deafness, did not hear the 
order, but the bullet whistled uncomfortably 
close to his cheek, and he turned, seeking an 
explanation. In an instant, the officer was 
upon him, and Edison had to open his bundle 
to clear himself. 

"Well, my friend," grunted the policeman, 
then, divided between chagrin and relief, "if I 
was as deaf as you are, I'd go a little slow on 
these kind of expeditions. Why, if I had been 
a better shot, I might have killed you!" 

"One day," records Milton Adams, who 
chummed with Edison during his Boston 



38 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

sojourn, "he bought the whole of Faraday's 
works on electricity, brought them home at 
four o'clock in the morning, and read steadily 
until I arose, when he made for Hanover 
Street, about a mile distant (where we took 
our meals) to secure breakfast. Edison's brain 
was on fire with what he had read, and he sud- 
denly remarked to me: 'Adams, I have got 
so much to do and life is so short that I am 
going to hustle,' and with that he started on a 
run for breakfast." 

Throughout all his career as a telegrapher, 
Edison rarely accepted a day job. He wanted 
these hours for his experiments, and it often 
puzzled his friends to know when and where 
he slept. Not in office hours, he had to give 
that up, and when not on duty he was nearly 
always to be found hard upon the heels of some 
problem at his shop. When he was fifty-five, 
a reporter asked him if he kept regular work- 
ing hours. 

"Oh," said Edison, "I do not work hard now. 
I come to the laboratory about eight o'clock 
every day and go home to tea at six, and then I 
study or work on some problem until eleven, 
which is mv hour for bed." 



THOMAS A. EDISON 39 

"Fourteen or fifteen hours a day can 
scarcely be called loafing," suggested his in- 
terviewer. 

"Well," replied the Wizard, "for fifteen 
years I worked on an average of twenty hours 
a day." 



Ill 

OTJTCR0PPINGS OF GENIUS 

Anxious days, however, were still ahead. 
Edison had given up his job as a telegrapher 
to promote the vote machine, his first inven- 
tion, and he did not intend to bind himself to 
an operator's table again. There were plenty 
of other schemes in his head waiting to be 
worked out. What he needed was a laboratory 
of his own, and skilled workmen to assist in 
evolving his many projects! But he might as 
well have wished for the moon. He had no 
money, and without capital it was clearly im- 
possible to be what he most desired to be — a 
great inventor. 

In the emergency, he did what many another 
in search of a career has done — he somehow 
made his way to "New York, arriving with 
scarcely enough cash in hand to rent a respect- 
able lodging, much less purchase the books and 
apparatus which he must have. Good Luck, 
Fortune, Invincible Determination — what you 

40 



THOMAS A. EDISON 41 

will — led him shortly afterward into Wall 
Street and to the head office of the Law Gold 
Indicator, where he hoped he might find an 
opening. And never was an arrival more 
opportune. 

The indicators or stock-tickers of this com- 
pany furnished "Gold news" to five or six 
hundred brokerage offices. And on this par- 
ticular morning the machines had chosen to 
balk. "Not only were all the repair men on 
the job, but in waiting were the head officers, 
and the uneasy messengers from each frantic 
broker, who was thus put summarily out of 
business. Edison walked into the hubbub, 
and managing, at length, to get close up to the 
"trouble finders," stood for a few moments an 
interested observer, his quick eye taking in all 
the complexities of the machinery, and some- 
thing else. Then he made his way to Mr, Law. 

"If you please, sir," he said quietly, "I be- 
lieve I can put things to rights." 

The great man stared, but his reply was 
emphatic : "Go ahead !" 

Without hesitation or bravado, quite in fact 
as though he had been at work in that particu- 
lar shop every morning for a year, Edison 



42 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

leaned over the machinery and connected up a 
loose contact spring, and at once the indicators 
began doing business with their usual chirpy 
routine. The befuddled repairmen looked 
foolish indeed. Mr. Law touched the shabby 
stranger on the arm and said briefly: "Step 
into the office, young man!" 

Edison came out a full-fledged technical 
overseer of the Law Gold Indicator Company, 
at a salary of $300 per month, and thus the 
first rung on the ladder was reached. Now, 
with such a princely salary, he could begin in 
earnest, and forthwith the young man's dream 
— a real laboratory — began to take shape. 
Bottles of chemicals lined the shelves, batteries 
of various kinds were bought and made, and 
"inventions" of many sorts got under way, 
mostly along the lines of telegraphy and elec- 
tricity. And here Edison was happy indeed! 
Way into the "wee small hours" he worked, 
and sometimes all night through; for then, as 
now, he held Time in contempt, and would 
never carry a watch. "The time to quit was 
when the job was ended!" he maintained, and 
woe to the man who sought to interrupt or dis- 
tract him! Deeply imbedded in his marrow 



THOMAS A. EDISON 43 

was the axiom of an old Scottish editor who 
had these words engraved above his desk: 
"Nothing is worse for those who have business 
than the visits of those who have none." 

As might have been expected, however, one 
of the first things to which the young inventor 
turned his hand was an improvement of the 
stock-ticker. Presently the president of the 
company asked him what he wanted for his 
devices. Modest in his demands, Edison was 
about to say $5,000, when good sense came to 
his aid — in those days no one had ever heard 
the phrase '"'passing the buck" — and he sub- 
stituted instead that he would rather the presi- 
dent made him an offer. Thereupon, he almost 
fell out of his chair; for the president named 
$40,000 as the sum the company was willing 
to pay! "My mouth flew open to voice my 
astonishment," said Edison, later. "But I was 
really too flabbergasted for speech, and the 
general, misreading my expression, quickly 
stated that it was the best they could do. I 
rallied then and played my part, quietly 
accepting the handsome sum." 

Check in hand, Edison mechanically made 
for the nearest bank, — he had always been used 



44 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

to cashing checks as soon as received. But 
when he thrust the slip into the window, pay- 
ment was refused. "He would have to be 
identified" the teller said. In his muddled 
condition, the real meaning of this failed to 
seep into the inventor's brain. He felt only 
that he had been "done," and he turned con- 
fusedly away and was leaving the bank, when 
he was met by an acquaintance, a man well- 
known in commercial circles, who quickly con- 
nected the young fellow's moody face with the 
slip in his hand, and paused to ask the trouble. 
How he laughed when Edison explained! But 
he put his arm around the young man's shoul- 
der and walked him over to the cashier's win- 
dow. Edison was soon "identified" to that 
individual's satisfaction, and the money was 
promptly forthcoming. "A great stack of it," 
as he afterward described the bundle of bills 
which was handed out to him. Placing the 
funds about his person, he got out, more in a 
quandary than ever. What should he do with 
such a vast sum? He knew how he wanted to 
invest it all right, but that would take time. 
Meanwhile, where could he keep the money? 
Banks were none too stable in those days, and 



THOMAS A. EDISON 45 

he was afraid to trust them. "He carried the 
money about with him for two days," says one 
of his biographers, "and probably no one be- 
fore or since has ever been so inconvenienced 
by an overplus of wealth. In the end a friend 
persuaded him to open an account at a reliable 
institution." 

Feeling himself now independent of a 
monthly pay-check, Edison gave up his posi- 
tion in the Law Gold Indicator Company, and 
removed his workshop to Newark, New Jer- 
sey, where he soon had a factory of his own in 
operation, and an experimenting shop, and the 
assistants he had so long desired. He began 
by manufacturing his improved stocktickers, 
for the substantial part of his business, and 
this work met with very considerable success. 
But Edison soon found that manufacturing 
and invention did not go well together. "I was 
a poor manufacturer," he says, "because I 
could not let well enough alone. My first im- 
pulse upon taking any apparatus into my 
hand, from an egg-beater to an electric motor, 
is to seek a way of improving it. Therefore, as 
soon as I have finished a machine I am anxious 
to take it apart again in order to make an 



46 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

experiment. That is a costly mania for a 
manufacturer." 

Shortly after the organization of his factory, 
the friends who interested themselves in the 
proceedings were surprised to find that the 
inventor had not installed a book-keeper. 
"Why," said they, "you can not hope to suc- 
ceed without an accountant. You can not 
yourself be bothered with all the little details 
of profit and loss and keeping things straight." 
So a book-keeper was hired, and after seeing 
him installed in his proper niche the inventor 
promptly forgot all about this part of his busi- 
ness. For a year and a day he bought, in- 
vented, manufactured, and sold, and then 
suddenly the "man of figures" appeared be- 
fore him with a sheet setting forth a "State- 
ment of the Twelve Months' Business." Edi- 
son took a hurried survey, and then gave a 
boyish whoop of joy. For the figures showed 
a gain of $8,000 during the year! 

"That is fine!" cried the inventor, shaking 
hands as enthusiastically as though all of this 
good fortune had been brought about directly 
by the book-keeper's own efforts. "We must 
celebrate!" And he gave orders on the spot 



THOMAS A. EDISON 47 

for a great banquet to be spread in the stock- 
room. 

Such a gathering as the invitation assem- 
bled ! All the members of the plant, from the 
overseer down to the least errand boy, sat down 
at the bountiful board, and no one was gayer 
than the host, as the eats and drinks fast dis- 
appeared and everyone talked and laughed 
and jested at once. It was a great success — 
a banquet long to be remembered! And Edi- 
son paid the bills for it with a glad heart, 
albeit a little cloud was rising in his own men- 
tal offing. He had been pondering matters a 
bit, and he couldn't quite see where the profits 
had been secured, or what had become of them. 
Accordingly the book-keeper was summoned 
to the private office. A busy two hours they 
made of it, and, as affairs progressed, Edi- 
son's face grew sober and long and the 
puffed-up accountant shrank into a nervous, 
red-faced, totally overwhelmed official. For 
divers errors had been made, and when the 
debits and credits had been sorted, instead of 
a profit of $8,000, there stood a plain loss of 
something over $7,000. 

So much for the usefulness of a book-keeper ! 



48 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Edison had all along felt that such an individ- 
ual was entirely superfluous, and he eased 
himself of a few very tart remarks. Then his 
own good sense conquered. He knew the 
accountant could neither make nor mar the 
business. So he indulged in a hearty, if some- 
what rueful laugh, over what the grand ban- 
quet had really celebrated, and heartened the 
book-keeper with the cheerful remark that 
"maybe they would do better next year!" 

It was apparent to Edison that his factory 
and his laboratory must be separated. He 
could not put a quietus on his ever-recurring 
"Why?" and "What iff, nor was it desirable 
that he should, for his ambition was still un- 
changed, he wanted to be a great inventor. 
So, in due time, a capable manager was found 
for the Newark factory, and the following year 
really did show a very excellent profit. But 
there was no banquet of rejoicing, for Edison 
himself was now deep in many things. Sub- 
sequently he moved out to Menlo Park, on 
the New York and Philadelphia Railroad, 
twenty-four miles from New York City, where 
he built a wonderful workshop and laboratory, 
and established a costly scientific library. But 



THOMAS A. EDISON 49 

this momentous event was not until after he 
had achieved certain of the triumphs in tele- 
graphy, which are recorded in the next chap- 
ter, when all the world was following his work 
with keenest interest, and the title of "The 
Wizard of Electricity" had become stamped 
upon him. 



IV 

EXPERIMENTS IN ELECTRICAL TELEGRAPHY 

Back in the days when he was employed 
in a railroad office in Indianapolis, Edison 
worked out his first telegraphic invention, and 
says he, "Necessity was certainly the mother 
of it!" Edison and a young fellow named 
Parmley got into the habit of taking press 
reports in their spare hours at night, in the 
place of the regular man, who was thus hap- 
pily enabled to enjoy a little "vacation." 

"I would sit down," says Edison, "for ten 
minutes, and 'take' as much as I could from 
the instrument, carrying the rest in my head. 
Then while I wrote out, my pard. would serve 
his turn, and so on. This worked very well 
until they put on a new man at the Cincinnati 
end. He was one of the quickest senders in 
the business, and we soon found ourselves 
totally at sea. We simply could not keep up 
with him. Clearly something had to be done, 
and I presently solved the difficulty. I got 

50 



THOMAS A. EDISON 51 

two old Morse registers and arranged them 
in such a way that by running a strip of paper 
through them the dots and dashes were re- 
corded on it by the first instrument as fast as 
they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, 
and were transmitted to us through the other 
instrument at any desired rate of speed. They 
would come in one instrument at the rate of 
forty words a minute, and would be ground 
out of our instrument at the rate of twenty- 
five. Then weren't we proud ! Our copy used 
to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it 
up on exhibition; and our manager used to 
come and gaze at it silently with a puzzled 
expression. He could not understand it, 
neither could any of the other operators, for 
we used to hide my impromptu automatic re- 
corder when our toil was over. But the crash 
came when there was a big night's work — a 
presidential vote, I think it was — and copy 
kept pouring in at the top rate of speed until 
we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. 
The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, 
an investigation was made, and our little 
scheme was discovered. We couldn't use it 
any more." 



52 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Another little labor-saver cropped out in 
the office at Memphis. Here messages that 
came in from New Orleans for New York had 
to be sent on to Louisville, taken again, and 
so forwarded by half a dozen relays to their 
destination. Of course in so many repetitions 
boundless errors were prone to creep in, and 
the service left a good deal to be desired. Nat- 
urally, too, the clumsiness of the system at- 
tracted Edison's eye. In a short time he had 
perfected an automatic repeater, which could 
be attached to the line, and so send the mes- 
sages on of its own accord. The device 
worked very well, and might have been ad- 
vantageously taken up by the company. But 
it happened that a relative of one of his em- 
ployers had a similar instrument on the way to 
completion; so, instead of advancing his own 
interests, Edison's ingenuity cost him his job! 

Here again, however, failure served only to 
teach the young inventor a lesson. If he 
meant to succeed he must somehow install 
himself in the favor of the Western Union, 
for any telegraphical device which he invented 
must be taken up by them to insure its profit- 
ability. So, as he set to work in earnest in his 



THOMAS A. EDISON 53 

Newark shop, on a scheme which he had long 
had in mind, he kept a weather eye open to 
the main chance. And Fortune favored him: 
shortly news drifted in that there was a seri- 
ous breakdown in the line between New York 
and Albany. Tom Edison at once dropped 
everything, and presented himself before the 
president of the company. 

"Look here," he said, "if I fix up this dif- 
ficulty within two or three hours, will you take 
up an invention I have in hand and give it 
honest consideration?" 

"Yes, sir," returned the president heartily, 
"we will consider anything you care to send 
us now or any time, if you get us out of this 
fix within two days!" 

Away went young Edison at a speed 
equaled only by his zeal. Down at the main 
office he called up Pittsburg and asked for 
their best operator. When he had him, he told 
him to get hold of the best man at Albany, and 
to have him wire down along the line and see 
how near he could come to New York. In- 
side of an hour came the message: "Can wire 
down to within two miles of Poughkeepsie." 
It was only a short run to this point, and a 



54 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

train was just due. Inside of his own time 
limit, Edison had the line in operation, and 
the way paved for his next triumph — an in- 
vention called the duplex telegraph, which 
had resulted from the query, "Why can't two 
messages go over the same wire in opposite 
directions at the same time?" 

Gladly indeed did the Western Union take 
this up, for it would not only double the ca- 
pacity of the single wire, but it would save the 
company thousands of dollars. Edison, how- 
ever, was not satisfied with the performance 
of his invention : for another query had imme- 
diately intervened. Why couldn't four mes- 
sages be sent just as well? He felt sure that 
they could. And presently he had evolved the 
quadruplex device, by which two messages 
could travel simultaneously in each direction. 
!N~ow two sending and two receiving operators 
were employed at each end of a single wire, 
and the value of each line was multiplied by 
four. The principle involved was simple 
enough: the electrical currents used were of 
differing strength and each receiving machine 
would record only from the current specially 
adapted to it. This invention saved unreckon- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 55 

able millions to the Western Union in wire and 
repairs, for now by the use of the quadruplex 
a thousand miles of wire was changed presto 
into four thousand. Edison was paid $30,000 
for his triumph. But he spent it all trying to 
invent a plan to carry six messages simultane- 
ously on one wire! This attempt was never 
a commercial success, so that, while the quad- 
ruplex telegraph was the greatest invention so 
far conceived in connection with electrical 
telegraphy, it did not add one cent to the in- 
ventor's finances. However, it was the inven- 
tion and not the money which concerned 
Thomas A. Edison; for, even after he had lost 
the $30,000 in experimenting upon further tri- 
umphs for one wire, he was not ready to give 
up. 

And again his perseverance won! He pro- 
duced the harmonic multiplex telegraph. By 
this invention tuning-forks, or "reeds," moved 
by electro-magnets, serve as keys to transmit 
impulses over the wire. At the opposite end 
are more tuning-forks, which vibrating with 
the same frequency, "pick up" the current 
which belongs to them, and give no heed what- 
ever to stronger or weaker currents. A num- 



56 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

ber of tuning-forks can be operated at the same 
time, and as many as sixteen messages have 
gone over the wire together, eight each way, 
by means of the harmonic multiplex system. 

All this time Edison had been steadily im- 
proving the main telegraph system, patenting 
various little devices one after another, which 
the Western Union eagerly took up and ex- 
ploited, and he now turned himself to the ques- 
tion of speed. The best of operators could 
turn out but thirty or forty words per minute, 
while the characteristics of both line and re- 
ceiving apparatus allowed of a much greater 
rapidity. "We ought to have automatic send- 
ers and receivers, capable of transcribing three 
or four hundred words per minute," Edison 
concluded, and set himself to the problem. 

He worked out a scheme of perforating 
paper tape with Morse characters, the tapes 
being afterward run through a transmitter at 
a great speed. The message was to be received 
by means of an inking device which recorded 
the same in Morse code upon a receiving tape. 
But the ink: that was the real problem. ~No 
fluid had then been manufactured which would 
serve the purpose. So Edison turned chemist ! 



THOMAS A. EDISON 57 

And how hard and untiring he worked at this 
new stunt is best told in the words of Charles 
Bachelor, his friend and chief -assistant in those 
all-absorbing days : 

"I came in one night," he says, "and there 
sat Edison with a pile of chemistries and chem- 
ical books five feet high. He had ordered them 
from New York, London and Paris. He stud- 
ied them night and day. He ate at his desk and 
slept in his chair. In six weeks he had gone 
through the books, written a volume of ab- 
stracts, made two thousand experiments on the 
formulas, and had produced a solution (the 
only one in the world) which would do the very 
thing he wanted done — record over two hun- 
dred words a minute on a wire 250 miles long. 
He ultimately succeeded in recording 3,100 
words a minute. " 

And still the half has not been told! For 
many of these scientific works over which Edi- 
son pored so industriously were in French and 
German — languages in which he was self- 
taught and still far from perfect. He literally 
had to grub his way through them. But he 
mastered these as he did his other problems. 

Edison's next invention, the autographic 



58 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

telegraph, might never have sprung into being 
had the telephone then been the thing of per- 
fection and general use that it is to-day. The 
object of the autographic telegraph was to re- 
produce in one place the counterpart of a mes- 
sage written by the sender in another place. 
It rose from the necessity for communication 
between the different departments in business 
concerns, and it served further to supply writ- 
ten orders which might be filed away for fu- 
ture reference. To-day there are various forms 
of writing telegraphs, that devised by Elisha 
Gray and known as the telautograph being the 
most complete. The instruments find their 
chief use in banking houses, department stores, 
clubs, and government institutions for the 
transmission of orders from the various depart- 
ment heads. Edison's scheme provided that 
the message be written with a pencil on a spe- 
cially prepared paper. And here again he 
delved into chemistry to produce what he re- 
quired. 

Edison's "grasshopper telegraph" was his 
most unique work in the telegraphic field. It 
arose from the query: "Why can't messages 
be sent from the fast-flying train ?" And while 



) 

THOMAS A. EDISON 59 

it provided successfully for communication be- 
tween telegraphic stations and moving trains, 
it was never much of a commercial success, for 
the reason that few people found such messages 
necessary. This system, which transmitted 
messages across an air space of as high as 560 
feet between the wires and the cars, probably 
gave Edison his first inkling of wireless teleg- 
raphy. He had unbounded faith in this tri- 
umph and applied for a patent as early as 
1885. 

"Wireless is going to be the telegraph of the 
sea," he said, then. "The time will come when 
anyone on the maritime exchange may send out 
a wireless message and catch any vessel afloat 
in any part of the world and change her rout- 
ing. I don't think so much about the outlook 
for the wireless system on land. That field is 
practically occupied. But the ocean field is 
open. I think it will be only a question of a 
few years before wireless is developed to a point 
where it will be a practical and important fac- 
tor in the industrial world." 

But other things were claiming Edison's at- 
tention and he was not free to push the matter 
with his customary zeal. The Government 



60 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

with its slow and tardy precision, took six 
years to act upon his claim and finally allowed 
him patent rights in 1891, but now others had 
entered the lists. Marconi in particular had 
taken up the subject, and Edison was quite 
content to give way to the young Italian, for 
whom he held the deepest admiration and con- 
fidence, feeling that in him rested the ability 
to perfect the scheme and bring it into prac- 
tical working order round the world. 

Edison's last telegraph message, with him- 
self as the operator, was sent in 1896, during 
the Electrical Exhibition in New York. For 
twenty-six years he had scarcely given a 
thought to telegraphy, and the friends who 
now jokingly asked him to take a turn at press 
reporting were of the opinion that he would 
not know a dot from a dash. Indeed, Edison 
himself was a little dubious as to the outcome, 
but he accepted the challenge, and the little 
company went down to the telegraph room of 
the New York Journal. Once inside the place, 
however, a smile swept the Wizard's face, as 
he stood listening to the machines nearest him, 
clicking out their messages from all parts of 



THOMAS A. EDISON 61 

the world, and he observed genially: "Oh, I 
guess I'm all right yet." 

Then, to the amazement of all, the old cham- 
pion calmly sat himself down in the appointed 
place and began speedily to reel off in his in- 
imitable "copper plate style," the message that 
poured in rapidly from the main office, while 
he selected and lighted a cigar with his disen- 
gaged hand, and went on without a break to the 
end; then he commenced to repeat the mes- 
sage just to see how he could send. This, too, 
was accomplished with speed and accuracy, and 
the inventor rose in delight. 

"I believe I could receive or send if I live to 
be a thousand," he said smilingly. "It is not 
a thing one forgets. It read as easily as book 
print, but it kept me scratching to set it down." 



V 

EDISON AND THE TELEPHONE 

*No modern invention has had a more rapid 
and interesting evolution than the telephone. 
To-day it is a household and business necessity. 
Yet, less than forty-five years ago the public 
had never heard of such a thing. On its first 
appearance, the Western Union was asked to 
buy the telephone, but they laughingly said 
that they had no use for an electrical toy ! To- 
day there are ten times more telephone than 
telegraph wires and their earnings are eight 
times more. As many messages are telephoned 
as are sent by the combined service of tele- 
graph, post, and messenger. 

The wonder now is that the telephone was 
not discovered by the many who sought to im- 
prove the telegraph, for nearly all of these men 
sensed the possibility of transmitting speech 
by wire. Only one of them, however, followed 
up the trail and put out a working model. This 

62 



THOMAS A. EDISON 63 

was Alexander Graham Bell. "Had I known 
more about electricity, and less about sound," 
he is reported to have said, "I would never 
have invented the telephone." And this is the 
real reason the telegraph inventors did not se- 
cure this triumph : they were working to make 
an instrument to carry the voice, but they went 
at it by telegraphic methods. 

So slowly did things move at first that it was 
almost a year after its invention before the tele- 
phone showed any business activity. Then the 
wave of popularity rose; in three months 778 
telephones were in use, and the Bell Telephone 
Company was organized. 

Now, indeed, the Western Union began to 
realize the value of an opportunity lost. To 
their dismay, business men demanded the tele- 
phone. What could they do about it? The 
answer was plain: get out a competitive in- 
strument. They at once formed the American 
"Speaking-Telephone" Company, and took 
their difficulty to Thomas A. Edison, the man 
who had for so long spelled success and popu- 
larity for them. 

"See here," they said. "We want you to get 
us out a telephone." 



64 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

"Very well," returned Edison. 

No sooner did he begin than his practised eye 
speedily detected the thing that was barring 
the progress of the telephone — the transmitter. 
Indeed, there was "no such animile!" The 
Bell people were talking into a magneto re- 
ceiver. "And," says Edison, "you never heard 
such a noise and buzzing as there was in that old 
machine! I went to work and monkeyed 
around, and finally struck the notion of the 
carbon button and the induction coil." 

Simple enough it sounds in the telling ! We 
can only guess at the number of hours of 
thought and experiment that went into it. One 
strong ally Edison had in the beginning, the 
knowledge of the variable resistance of carbon 
under pressure. He had made use of this in 
various inventions. And it stood him again in 
good stead. The carbon transmitter improved 
Bell's invention a hundred-fold, and the West- 
ern Union was delighted. 

"We will give you $100,000 for your rights," 
said the president. 

"Very well," returned Edison, by now so 
used to flattering terms that he was skilfully 
able to conceal his surprise. It had been such 




THOMAS A. EDISON 
From a photograph taken in early manhood 



THOMAS A. EDISON 65 

a comparatively easy job that he had fixed 
$25,000 in his own mind as about right. "But," 
he continued, "there is one condition: that is 
that you do not pay me a lump sum. I want 
$6,000 every year for seventeen years — -the life 
of the patent." 

Then was Mr. Or ton's turn to be surprised. 
But he agreed with equal promptness. 

"By that stroke," Mr. Edison naively re- 
corded later, "I saved seventeen years of 
worry! If I had taken the cash all at once, it 
would have gone the way of all my money. 
My ambition in those days was about four 
times ahead of my capital!" 

And small wonder, with as high as fifty in- 
ventions on hand at one time, and as many em- 
ployees, often high-priced men, working at 
piece work. 

But to return to the carbon transmitter. 
Imagine the chagrin of the Western Union 
when it was found that Edison could not fit 
his invention to a telephone instrument of his 
own. There were certain points where he could 
not help but infringe upon Bell's claims. The 
thing simply could not be done. Likewise 
Bell tried to adopt Edison's scheme in a dif- 



66 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

ferent way, but he could not do it. Each had 
an invention of little use standing alone, but 
invaluable when combined. The Western 
Union tried to build Bell 'phones with Edison 
transmitters, but this couldn't be done either. 
Nor did anything but heavy lawsuits result 
from their attempt to buy up and establish 
claims prior to Bell's. In the end a com- 
promise was effected, whereby the Bell Tele- 
phone Company became the sole owners of the 
telephone system. 

The carbon transmitter did not by any means 
end Edison's usefulness in the field of tele- 
phony. Once interested, he went on improving 
receivers and transmitters and taking out one 
patent after another for his various designs. 
He also evolved many systems for the trans- 
mission of speech which included all kinds of 
carbon instruments — the chemical telephone, 
the inertia telephone, the water telephone, vol- 
taic pile telephone, mercury telephone, and 
condenser telephone. The electro-motograph 
receiver, involving what the Wizard termed his 
"electro-motograph principle," is deemed Edi- 
son's second triumphant contribution to tele- 
phony. The Western Union paid him $100,- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 67 

000 for its application to telegraphy, Edison 
arranging the same novel terms of payment as 
he had for his carbon transmitter. Curiously 
enough, too, this invention also came at the 
instigation of the company. 

The Page patent, which related to the move- 
ment of the lever at the other end of a telegraph 
wire by magnet, had been bought up by a rival 
concern, and Mr. Orton went to Edison in con- 
siderable perturbation. Unless some way could 
be found to get around this, the Western 
Union's position was critical indeed. For, as 
matters then stood, possession of this "relay 
and sounder principle," as it was called, was 
vital to telegraphy. 

"It seemed a pretty hard job," said Edison. 
"No one had ever conceived of withdrawing 
an armature lever except by magnet. But I 
went at it that night. And I had one thing 
for a base: some years before I had chanced 
upon an interesting and very peculiar phenom- 
enon. I found that if a piece of metal con- 
nected to a battery was rubbed over a mois- 
tened piece of chalk resting on a metal con- 
nected to the other pole, when the current 
passed the friction was greatly diminished. 



68 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

When the current was reversed the friction 
was greatly increased over what it was when 
no current was passing. So I substituted a 
piece of chalk turned by a small electric motor 
for a magnet, and then connected a sounder to 
a metallic finger resting on the chalk, when 
presto ! the Page combination was as dust and 
ashes in Jay Gould's covetous grasp!" x 

Mr. Edison's remarkable instrument, the 
electro-chemical or loud-speaking telephone, 
which can be made to sound three or four times 
as loud as a man can shout, rose from the con- 
flict between the Bell and Edison patents in 
England. "Send us a receiver without a mag- 
net," cabled Edison's agent. "We are re- 
strained from the use of Bell's device." A 
large order ! Anyone but an Edison would have 
been "stumped," for the magnet was a prime 
factor in converting the sound waves into elec- 
trical waves and vice versa. But not so the 
Wizard. He turned triumphantly to his elec- 
tro-motograph principle again, and shortly 
had in hand his ingenious "chalk receiver," 
which consisted simply of a cylinder of chalk 

1 Mr. Gould was then the chief owner and director of the 
Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Co., an organization which 
harried the Western Union at every turn. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 69 

moistened with certain chemicals, a thin spring, 
and a diaphragm of mica in a resonator. And 
the result was wonderful! "A much too in- 
genious invention," wrote Bernard Shaw, who 
was then in the employ of the Edison Com- 
pany, in the establishment of telephone ex- 
changes abroad; "it is a telephone of such 
stentorian efficiency that it bellows your most 
private communications all over the house, in- 
stead of whispering them with some sort of 
discretion." But it saved Edison's foreign 
trade, and eventually brought him a draft of 
thirty thousand pounds for his English rights. 
And here again the inventor had the laugh 
on himself! He accepted the offer thinking 
it was for thirty thousand dollars, and when 
he found that it was for • thirty thousand 
pounds instead, his surprise amounted almost 
to consternation. 

Marvelous performances were wrought with 
the various developments of the loud-speaking 
telephone, in the days when any kind of a tele- 
phone was a curiosity, and people would as- 
semble in great crowds to witness a demonstra- 
tion. At the first public exhibition in New 
York the hall was packed with a delighted 



70 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

audience who listened to "such enchanting nov- 
elties" as Mary had a little lamb, Jack and Jill, 
John Brown's Body, the alphabet, whistling, 
laughter loud and long, and such other inspira- 
tions as came to Mr. Charles Bachelor, who 
was at the other end of the wire in a distant part 
of the building. "A truly remarkable inven- 
tion," everybody said, but nevertheless there 
was some dubious head-shaking when it was 
announced that by the use of the electro-chem- 
ical telephone a man talking in New York had 
been heard 1,000 feet from the receiver in an 
open field at Menlo Park. 

Few people sensed the workings of the tele- 
phone. They had understood the telegraph 
readily enough. It was easy to see that by 
simply breaking and joining a current, dots 
and dashes might be made ; but it was a differ- 
ent matter to conjecture how the exact tone 
and quality of the voice could be heard and 
understood miles distant. Not many people 
believed like the school teacher who was called 
on for an explanation — that the wire was hol- 
low and they talked through it — but they didn't 
understand it, and they looked upon it simply 
as an electrical freak, — a thing totally without 



THOMAS A. EDISON 71 

a future. That was forty odd years ago. To- 
day 12,700,000 telephones are connected to the 
Bell system. There are 25,700,000 miles of 
wire, with a total investment of $1,450,000,- 
000, and a force of employees numbering 
235,000. 

Aside from his valued services in training 
countless telephone experts to establish ex- 
changes both at home and abroad, — a story 
which there is no space here to relate, — Edison 
did another thing in its way as valuable as the 
induction coil and the carbon button. When 
telephones were first set up, it was customary 
to ring the bell and ask ponderously "Are you 
there?" or "Are you ready to talk?" Edison 
did away with this, one day, so the story goes, 
when he yelled "Hello!" into the transmitter, 
in his delightfully brief and matter-of-fact 
fashion. Hello! No other word could be so 
altogether pat, and it has gone around the 
world, as essential to telephony almost as elec- 
tricity itself. 



VI 



THE STORY OF THE PHONOGRAPH 



It is to the phonograph, more perhaps than 
to any other of his inventions, that Thomas A. 
Edison owed his title of "Wizard." And small 
wonder — there is something positively uncanny 
in the ability to take a few pieces of metal and 
preserve sound so that it may be kept for cen- 
turies to come. Yet the inventor himself re- 
gards the phonograph as one of the simplest of 
his inventions. "Why," said he, "it all but dis- 
covered itself." 

It was back in those busy Menlo Park days, 
of 1877, when he was busy with the telephone 
transmitter. While working with a disk of 
carbon, having a sharpened pin point on the 
back of it, Edison noticed that when he spoke 
against the disk, the sound vibrations made the 
point prick his finger. Instantly the inventor 
called to mind the phonautograph, a discovery 
made by Leon Scott, some twenty years be- 
fore. This consisted of a piece of bladder 

72 



THOMAS A. EDISON 73 

stretched over a frame, with a hog's bristle fas- 
tened stoutly in the center. When words were 
spoken close against the frame, the membrane 
vibrated with the motion of the sound waves, 
causing the bristle to scratch a little wavy track 
or sound picture of the human voice on a re- 
volving cylinder which had been well-coated 
with lamp black. 

"Hmm!" mused Edison, as the pin point 
gave him another jog. He saw that he had 
gone a step farther than Scott. But he was too 
engrossed with the work in hand to consider 
anything else just then. 

Another day he was absorbed in a device for 
the automatic repetition of telegraph mes- 
sages. Busy with feeding a strip of paper into 
the sending machine, which recorded the dots 
and dashes of the original message in a series of 
indentations, "The Wizard" saw that he was 
making pictures of the sounds communicated 
by the telegraph message on paper. 

Pictures of sound! There it was again! 
And quickly the great inventor was on his 
feet. "Boys," he cried excitedly, "I can make 
a talking-machine!" 

Eagerly reaching for pen and draughting 



74 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

paper, he began at once upon the specifica- 
tions, while the boys, used as they were to their 
chief's doing great things, stared at one another 
with disbelief plain upon their faces. In ten 
minutes the model was complete, even to the 
piece-work price $8, in Edison's trim figures 
in one corner, and he summoned John Kruesi, 
the best workman then on his force. 

"How soon can you get this out?" he asked. 

Kruesi's keen eye took in the details with 
lightning quickness. "I do not know exactly, 
sir," he said, "but I will do my best." 

Edison knew Kruesi's best. It was a force 
as keen-edged and as tireless and indefatigable 
as his own. Well he knew that neither time, 
food nor water would interfere with the prog- 
ress of the model, and he turned again to his 
own work, dismissing the matter entirely. For 
he had no great faith in this first draught. He 
thought he might possibly "hear a word or so 
that would give hope of a future for the idea." 

Thirty hours passed, and then Kruesi pre- 
sented himself with the completed device. And 
a crude, clumsy enough affair it was — as little 
like the perfect machines of to-day as one could 
well imagine. The cylinder turned by hand 



THOMAS A. EDISON 75 

and the indentations were to be made on tin- 
foil. For the first phonograph was planned 
to make its own sound pictures and then to 
reproduce the sound on the spot. 

Edison looked at the machine a bit dubiously, 
and the boys gathered laughingly around. "I'll 
bet a box of cigars it don't work," observed 
Carman, the foreman of the machine shop, 
sotto voce. 

But Edison, like most deaf people, often 
hears when he is least expected to. "Done," 
he returned, in the quick, sportsmanlike com- 
radery which made him so beloved by his men, 
and then, leaning forward and slowly turning 
the handle, he spoke into the mouthpiece: 

"Mary had a little lamb, 

Its fleece was white as snow, 

And everywhere that Mary went 

The lamb was sure to go." 

Then the cylinder was returned to the start- 
ing place, and to the astonishment of all there 
came sharp and distinct, in a curious metallic 
voice, the little time-worn verse, just as Edi- 
son had recited it. 

Imagine the triumph of the moment! Few 
inventions have ever been conceived and exe- 



76 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

cuted so swiftly. Kruesi's eight-dollar ma- 
chine, the world's first phonograph, could not 
be bought to-day at any price. It is in the 
patent office at South Kensington, London. 

Never before did an invention arouse a 
quicker and more world-wide interest. News- 
papers and magazines, both at home and 
abroad, were quick to take it up, and Edison 
himself, in an article in the North American 
Review, set forth his ideas for the use of the 
phonograph. He saw in it perfection for the 
telephone and the telegraph; it could be used 
in the court room for keeping an accurate rec- 
ord of all proceedings — an item of no little 
moment on occasion ; it would be invaluable for 
the entertainment of patients in hospitals and 
asylums, and as an elocution or language 
teacher ; public speakers could by its use reach 
unlimited audiences ; it would be a vast booster 
for speed and accuracy in offices, — the boss 
need only to open a drawer and speak into a 
receiver. When the typist was ready, she could 
adjust her ear- tubes and set the machine going, 
and any time she failed to understand she could 
reverse the record, and so right herself without 
calling down wrath! 



THOMAS A. EDISON 77 

"Furthermore," said Edison, continuing his 
prophecies in his own happy, whimsical fash- 
ion, "the phonograph will undoubtedly be 
largely devoted to music — either vocal or in- 
strumental — and may possibly take the place 
of the teacher. It will sing the child to sleep, 
tell us what o'clock it is, summon us to dinner, 
and warn the lover when it is time to vacate the 
front porch. As a family record it will be 
precious, for it will preserve the sayings of 
those dear to us, and even recite the last mes- 
sages of the dying. It will enable the chil- 
dren to have dolls that really speak, laugh, 
cry, and sing, and imitation dogs that bark, 
cats that meow, lions that roar, roosters that 
crow. It will preserve the voices of our great 
men, and enable future generations to listen 
to speeches by a Lincoln or a Gladstone." 

Carrying out his idea of preserving the voices 
of the great, Mr. Edison filed away, in his 
beautiful country home at Llewellyn Park, a 
wonderful collection of records embodying the 
voices of Gladstone, Tennyson, Bismarck, 
Browning, Henry Ward Beecher and countless, 
other noted personages. The story is told that 
once upon a time Edison was exhibiting these 



78 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

"Voices" for the benefit of Henry M. Stanley, 
the explorer, and his wife. Mrs. Stanley inter- 
estedly inquired whose voice he would choose 
to record, if he might have the pick of all the 
great men of the past, and Edison instantly 
answered "Napoleon's," nor could any amount 
of argument shake him from this decision. 

Many years ago, Edison added a further 
wise suggestion for the use of the phonograph : 
that of recording the works of the great writ- 
ers of fiction. He himself dictated a consider- 
able extract of Nicholas Nichleby, thus finding 
that six cylinders, twelve inches long and six 
inches in diameter would record the entire 
novel. As yet, however, this part of the phono- 
graph business has not received the attention 
that is bound to be given it. Think what such 
a treat would mean to the blind, or to the one 
who comes home with eyes worn out from the 
day's strain, or even of the satisfaction to your- 
self to put on the record of your favorite story, 
the while you accomplish some task you have 
been dreading! 

Naturally, in its infancy the phonograph was 
the subject of a good deal of curiosity. To 
satisfy a universal demand for phonographs 



THOMAS A. EDISON 79 

for exhibition purposes, Edison had a number 
of machines made and turned them over to 
some of his force to exploit. Needless to say, 
these fellows had the time of their lives! 
Great receptions were accorded them wherever 
they went. In London, for example, Glad- 
stone, Lord Rowton, and the Earl of Aber- 
deen were the hosts of the hour, and wonderful 
indeed was the attentive interest, which 
amounted almost to awe, in the varied program 
that was given. 

In Abyssinia, the record first produced 
spoke a message of friendship and good-will in 
Queen Victoria's own voice. Emperor Mene- 
lik listened with profound attention, first as 
the voice came from the trumpet, and then with 
the ear tubes. After repeating the operation 
two or three times, he stood for a long time in 
profound silence; then roused himself and or- 
dered a royal salute to be fired, while he stood 
respectfully before "the speaking mechanical 
beast." 

In Thibet the phonograph first appeared in 
Lhassa, the religious capital of the Buddhist 
faith, in 1897. To this ancient town none but 
Buddhists are supposed to have entrance. But 



80 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

hither, one day, traveled a Burmese merchant, 
with an Edison phonograph to show to the 
Grand Lama. He knew that in this land 
prayerwheels were constantly employed to reel 
off written or printed prayers, and he felt that 
if he could introduce a machine to speak pray- 
ers instead, his fortune would be made. Some- 
how he had managed to get a record made of 
one of the sacred Buddhist writings, and the 
surprise and astonishment of the monarch and 
his dignitaries may be imagined when they 
heard the machine declaim what was to them a 
miracle. Their delight knew no bounds when 
the monarch himself spoke the beautiful 
prayer, "Jewel in the Lotus," into the machine, 
and the cylinder being reversed, the words 
came back to them in the Grand Lama's own 
tones ! Thereafter, for many days the phono- 
graph was kept busy, and needless to say the 
fondest dreams of the Burmese trader were 
realized. 

The boys in Edison's laboratory were not 
slow in finding out that one record might be 
run over another with astonishing results, and 
"trick" records formed the side-splitting sport 
of the noon hour. The possibilities of the 




THE YOUNG EDISON AND HIS FIRST PHONOGRAPH 
From a photograph 



THOMAS A. EDISON 81 

phonograph as a practical joker, too, were not 
neglected. Indeed, Edison himself set the pace 
in this latter instance, for nothing has ever 
given him keener enjoyment than to "get a 
good one" on some of his friends. On a certain 
occasion, he hid a phonograph in a guest's 
room, and then timed the gentleman's retire- 
ment to a nicety. Scarcely was he comfortably 
settled in bed, when a clock struck eleven, 
slowly and solemnly, and a hollow voice an- 
nounced in measured tones: "One hour more!" 
What in the world? The visitor sat up in 
alarm. Had the hour of doom arrived? For 
some minutes he waited motionless, and then 
good sense conquered. He lay down again, 
but try as he might he could not sleep. He 
was waiting for the midnight hour! After a 
century or so, as it seemed, the clock chimed 
forth, and almost on the instant the awful 
voice announced : "Twelve o'clock ! Prepare to 
die !" The guest, however, was in anything but 
a docile mood. Springing from his bed, he 
leaped into the hall at one bound, there to be 
confronted by Edison in convulsions of mirth! 
Naturally, it is a wide step from the first 
models of the phonograph to the beautiful mod- 



82 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

ern adaptations of the builders' art, and many 
people have had a hand in it. But it is to Mr. 
Edison and Mr. A. G. Bell, the inventor of the 
telephone, that we are indebted for most of 
the improvements in talking mechanism. Tin- 
foil was found practically worthless — the im- 
pressions were imperfectly made and by no 
means durable. Wax was the next experiment, 
but it, too, proved imperfect. Next Edison 
delved into the subject of animal and vegetable 
oils, trying every known element, both do- 
mestic and foreign, and at last, after a pro- 
tracted session of five days and nights, fixed 
upon the material used to-day, which is in plain 
language no more nor less than a special kind 
of soap ! Having found the best material for 
making records, the next step was to bring 
their production up to a fine art. 

And here again Mr. Edison spared neither 
pains nor expense. Indeed, the phonograph 
is the one invention in which he has never lost 
interest, and upon it he has expended a prodig- 
ious amount of energy, putting in night after 
night in his laboratory in his efforts to secure 
the most perfect reproduction of sound possi- 
ble, in all taking out nearly one hundred pat- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 83 

ents on improvements. Obviously, the greatest 
shortcoming of the machine was its lack of 
realism, and it is upon this point that most of 
Mr. Edison's efforts have been directed, until 
now it is baffling even to the most expert ears 
to distinguish between living singers or instru- 
mentalists and the reproduction or recreation 
of their work. 



VII 

THE ELECTEIC LIGHT 

Edison had been working with electrical ap- 
pliances for a decade, and had won his Wizard's 
title, before the electric light seems even to have 
remotely occurred to him, and then it came in 
the form of a question to a statement which the 
world of physicists and electricians had made 
conclusive, that subdivision of the electric cur- 
rent was impossible. 

"Why?" asked Edison, and, following the 
habit he had acquired long ago of testing the 
truth of every assertion, no matter on what au- 
thority, he "went to work and monkeyed 
around," and presently satisfied himself that 
the learned men were wrong. He was sure 
that the electric current was not only possible 
of subdivision, but that the result could be 
made highly practicable. "There is no rea- 
son," he said to himself, "why we can't light 
our homes by incandescence. Moreover, by the 

84 



THOMAS A. EDISON 85 

use of small motors, the same current which 
furnishes light can be made to run the washing 
machine, the sewing machine, the churn, and all 
sorts of household machinery." 

That year, 1877, was "carbon year" in Edi- 
son's laboratory. The Wizard had just com- 
pleted the carbon transmitter, and had on hand 
a half dozen miscellaneous carbon articles. 
Indeed, carbon of some sort, as we remember, 
had served him in every one of his tele- 
graph and telephone inventions. Naturally, he 
turned to carbon at once for first aid. And 
his initial trial marked the originality that was 
his in every method of procedure: he lighted 
a strip of carbonized paper up to incandescence 
— white heat — in the open air, merely to see 
how much current was required for the proc- 
ess. Of course on becoming incandescent the 
carbon oxidized and the paper went to pieces, 
just as Edison had known it would. Various 
inventors with an incandescent lamp in mind 
had tried carbon with like results, and it had 
been discarded by them as hopeless. But the 
Wizard had accomplished what others had pro- 
nounced impossible too often to put credence 
in anyone's attempts but his own. So now, 



86 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

having determined the strength of current, he 
put a like strip of carbon in a vacuum, dis- 
charging the air by means of a handworked 
pump, and this time the carbonized strip 
burned at incandescence for about eight min- 
utes. Then it oxidized and went to pieces as 
before, and the Wizard straightway began a 
contest to prevent this. Various expedients 
were tried, the most ingenious being coating the 
carbon with powdered glass, which in melting 
would protect the carbon from the atmosphere. 
But all attempts failed, and Edison, not yet 
ready to give up his beloved carbon, was com- 
pelled for the moment to set it aside and try 
something else. 

Experiments were now made with platinum 
wire, and with such refractory metals as boron, 
ruthenium and chromium, brought to incandes- 
cence in the direct circuit, in connection with 
powdered silicon and a mixture of silicon and 
lime and other very infusible non-conductors 
in glass tubes* Some of these offered possibili- 
ties, but they were not simple enough for prac- 
tical commercial purposes. 

Then these interesting experiments were in- 
terrupted by the unexpected discovery of the 



THOMAS A. EDISON 87 

phonograph. For a year and more Edison's 
time and attention, day and night, were ab- 
sorbed by the invention and exhibition of this 
new miracle. Finally in July, 1878, feeling 
the need of a vacation, and wishing also to test 
his tasimeter, an instrument devised by him 
for measuring heat transmitted through vast 
distances of space, he joined an expedition to 
the West to observe an eclipse of the sun. Two 
delightful months of rest followed, and the 
Wizard came home keen to take up something 
new. What this should be was determined by 
a visit which he now made, in company with 
Professor Barker, of the University of Penn- 
sylvania, to the brass manufacturing estab- 
lishment of Wallace & Farmer, at Ansonia, 
Connecticut. The members of this firm were 
zealous pioneers in the field of electricity, and 
Edison saw much about their plant to interest 
him. For example, the place was lighted by 
arc lamps — the first the Wizard had seen — but 
the light was too glaring, too altogether big 
and bright for indoor purposes. 

"It was easy to see what it needed," said 
Edison later. "It needed to be divided. And 
Barker laughingly suggested that here was a 



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problem for me. 'Why don't you go at it, Edi- 
son, and subdivide the electric light so that it 
can be got in small units like gas?' I said that 
I had monkeyed with it a bit, and I was con- 
vinced that the thing could be done. Then 
you should have seen their faces ! They thought 
it could not be managed, of course, in any prac- 
tical way. Farmer had a room in his house, 
at Salem, lit up by means of electricity, using 
small pieces of platinum and iridium wire, 
which were made to incandesce by means of 
current from primary batteries. But the whole 
system was crude, and the lamps hopelessly 
short-lived. A real serviceable incandescent 
lamp seemed but an inventor's dream. How- 
ever, I went home fully determined to take 
up the search, and make good my word." 

Three things the inventor had already set- 
tled as the essential features of a perfect in- 
candescent lamp : 

1. High resistance. 

2. Small radiating surface. 

3. Capability of working in "multiple arc," 
or so that each lamp could be turned on or 
off without interfering with any others on the 
circuit. 






THOMAS A. EDISON 89 

Perhaps the first two items do not mean very- 
much to you, but to the electrician they stand 
as the commercial key to the whole problem. 
For they spell the weight of the copper used, 
and so determine the cost of the lamp. And 
here again the business side of Edison came 
to the fore. "We can't spend too much On con- 
ductors," he had figured to himself. "And 
if we are going to use wire of a practicable 
size, the voltage of the current (the pressure 
which overcomes resistance to its flow) will 
have to be high." He determined that the de- 
sired resistance could be secured at one hun- 
dred and ten volts, and this voltage has since 
been adopted as the standard electric light 
current. 

Now, with a current of relatively high pres- 
sure to contend with, it would be necessary to 
have a burner of a very great resistance. This 
could only be obtained by reducing the radiat- 
ing surface. Therefore, the real problem was 
to produce a hair-like carbon, capable of with- 
standing mechanical shock, and susceptible of 
being held at a temperature of over 2000° for 
a thousand hours or more before breaking. 
Moreover, a vacuum chamber or globe, for 



90 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

holding the carbon, must he formed so per- 
fectly and precisely, that, no matter what the 
conditions throughout all these trying hours, 
not a hint of air could enter to disintegrate 
the carbon. And not only this, but the lamps 
must be so simple in construction, carbon and 
all, that they could be manufactured at a price 
within the reach of the multitude. 

Quite a problem, taken all in all! "One 
which I had far rather was in Edison's hands 
than in mine," said Tyndall, the great English 
physicist and electrician. And this was by far 
the most charitable remark made. "The sub- 
division of the electric light is a problem be- 
yond the power of man to solve," said a com- 
mittee of scientists, appointed by the British 
Parliament to canvass the subject. 

However, Edison had by this time become 
well-used to having wise men rise up and call 
him a fool; so, notwithstanding that he was 
flying in the face of the well-proven law of 
conservation of energy which one and all cited, 
he did not swerve one iota in his purpose, or 
relax his efforts in the smallest degree. Tak- 
ing up his experiments where he had dropped 
them, he worked out various devices to pre- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 91 

vent platinum, iridium and such infusible met- 
als from melting. All of these attempts, how- 
ever, proved useless. But Edison was still 
optimistic. 

He had not yet found the right clue, but he 
was certain that he would come upon it in 
time. So with utter disregard for meals, and 
sleeping only at odd periods of the day or 
night, the Wizard kept his laboratory going 
without ceasing. Besides the struggle to find 
the material for a proper radiating surface, 
there was the lamp globe itself to be considered. 
This must be made of glass and absolutely air- 
tight, and there were, of course, no globes of 
this style manufactured, and indeed no pumps 
then in existence for obtaining the desired 
vacuum. A pump, then, was the first requisite, 
and to this the inventor gave prominence, for 
he knew that in this one item lay success or 
failure. By and by they had worked out a 
pump that would produce a vacuum up to 
about the one-hundred-thousandth part of 
an atmosphere. But this was not yet per- 
fect enough. More study and experiment 
followed, and after some two months or more 
of trials and disappointments at last the Wiz- 



92 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

ard evolved a model that would produce a 
vacuum up to the one-millionth part of an 
atmosphere. Now, too, he had perfected a one- 
piece glass glohe, in which all the joints were 
hermetically sealed during its manufacture 
into a lamp. 

All that remained was the proper material to 
incandesce — the thing, by the way, which 
everyone said could not be found! Again the 
inventor turned to his platinum experiments, 
and succeeded in producing a fair lamp of high 
resistance. But it was neither practical nor 
economical, for its construction involved some 
thirty feet of platinum wire wound upon a 
bobbin of infusible material. Moreover, Edi- 
son now felt that platinum and all other metals 
must be abandoned. 

What was there left? His old friend car- 
bon. All along he had been threshing this 
around in the background, and he determined 
to take up experiments again along this line. 
It was late at night, and Edison sat alone in his 
laboratory. As he pondered deeply, cogitat- 
ing where and how he should begin, his fingers 
absently strayed to a little pile of lampblack 
and tar that had been left by one of his assist- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 93 

ants. Unconsciously, as he puzzled, these same 
busy fingers began to roll and fashion a bit of 
the substance into a thin, wire-like thread, and 
at length the Wizard, becoming conscious of 
their action, glanced at what they had done: 
"Ah!" he asked himself, "how would this serve 
for a filament for my light?" 

Filament! Just what did Mr. Edison mean? 
He had coined a new word — "a definition-defy- 
ing term," which puzzled all the scientists who 
presently brought their great minds to bear 
upon it. 

And in this coinage was a germ which the 
Wizard felt to be invaluable. Eagerly he 
called his most valued assistant, Charles Bach- 
elor, and then set to work to have a perfect fila- 
ment rolled against his arrival. 

This was carefully inserted in their now 
almost absolute vacuum, and the current 
turned on. An intense glow of light resulted, 
but to the disappointment of the breathless 
watchers it did not last. The carbon soon 
burned out. 

"Why V s queried the inventor. 

He satisfied himself that it was because it 
was impossible to get the air out of the lamp- 



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black. Besides the thread was too brittle. 
The slightest shock to the lamp would break 
it. There was, however, proof positive that a 
carbon filament would work, but not in the 
form of lampblack and tar. 

What should it be? 

"Let's try a carbonized cotton thread," said 
Edison. 

Bachelor looked doubtful, but the experi- 
ment was begun. A short piece of the pre- 
pared thread, bent in the form of a hairpin, 
was clamped into a nickel mold, and placed 
in a muffle furnace where it was left five hours. 
The mold was then removed and cooled. But 
when it was opened the thread broke. An- 
other thread was put through the same pro- 
cess, only to break before it could be got into 
the vacuum. And so began a struggle for a 
perfect filament which lasted two days and two 
nights. At last a filament was got safely into 
the lamp, but in trying to attach it to the con- 
ducting wire, it broke in two. Again they 
tried, and finally on the night of their third 
day of trial, during which one and most of the 
time both had been on ceaseless vigil, they 
succeeded in getting a thread in place and the 



THOMAS A. EDISON 95 

current turned on. A clear, beautiful light 
shone forth to reward their patience and per- 
sistence. 

How happily they watched it! For they 
knew they looked upon the light which was 
henceforth to be the principal illumination of 
the world. And most carefully did they cher- 
ish it. Slowly, very slowly, more current was 
added. The frail filament stood the test 
bravely, and after a time it shone triumphant 
in a heat that would instantly have melted 
platinum wire. For forty-five hours it 
gleamed with unabated brightness, and then 
suddenly went out. But its purpose was 
served. It had shown beyond the shadow of 
a doubt that the incandescent lamp was en- 
tirely possible and practical. 

How warmly Edison grasped the hand of 
his assistant! He felt that those skilled fin- 
gers had accomplished what no one else on the 
force could have done, not even excepting 
himself. And no less wonderful than Bach- 
elor's hands was his temper: during all the 
nerve-racking hours over the filament, he had 
showed not even the slightest hint of impa- 
tience. Cheerful, good-natured and untiring, 



96 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

he was as zealous and interested as his chief 
in the outcome. He put the first filament into 
the incandescent lamp, and later he enjoyed 
the distinction of being the first man to be 
photographed in the new light. 

The cotton filament, however, was not an 
entire success. It possessed high resistance 
and small radiating surface, it could be burned 
in multiple arc, and the cost of production 
would be comparatively slight. All the requi- 
sites, then, had been met save one thing: it 
had burned only forty-five hours. Edison felt 
that a commercial beginning could not be 
made with a lamp that lasted less than one 
hundred hours. So, after a sleep which lasted 
straight round the clock, the Wizard plunged 
into the problem with a new zeal, setting his 
entire force to carbonizing everything in 
sight — paper, cardboard, wood splinters, 
straw, and what not. "In fact," says one of 
his biographers, "during these carbonizing 
days nothing was safe — umbrellas, walking- 
sticks, all vanished, and the probability is 
that if a lame man had called about that 
time his crutch would have gone the same 
way!" 



THOMAS A. EDISON 97 

Strange as it seemed, carbonized paper was 
finally made to stand the tests better than cot- 
ton thread. But it did not satisfy the Wizard. 
And the experiments went on. "Somewhere," 
he argued, "is the right material, and we shall 
chance upon it, if we keep up the search." 
Meantime, the manufacture of incandescent 
lamps using paper carbons was begun and car- 
ried on with a good deal of industry, which 
required the making of all sorts of special tools 
for the cutting and safe handling of the fila- 
ments, and the construction of the various 
parts of the lamp itself. 

One day the inventor got hold of a bamboo 
fan, and it followed the way of all other things 
which came into his hands in those days. 
Straightway, too, great excitement swept the 
laboratory. For the bamboo gave better re- 
sults than anything which had been tried ! Im- 
mediately Edison began posting himself on 
bamboos, and soon made the interesting but 
somewhat overwhelming discovery that there 
were at least 1,200 varieties of bamboo known, 
of which about 300 species were used com- 
mercially. 

Problem: What species had the fan been 



98 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

composed of? Were there other varieties 
more peculiarly adapted to his purpose? 

Already Edison had spent $40,000 on the 
incandescent lamp, hut this was as nothing. 
Always when there had been any item needed 
in his business, he had got it if it was gettable. 
ISTow he must have samples of every variety of 
bamboo grown. And the quickest and best 
way was to send men after them. 

Picture the marvelous wealth of incident 
and adventure that such a quest promised! 
For the bamboo flourished in far-away tropi- 
cal jungles, in the hinterland of China and 
Japan, the West Indies, Mexico, Ceylon, 
British Guiana, India, the wilderness of the 
Amazon; through it lay the runways of the 
deadly cobra, the trails of the Hon and the 
tiger, and the fierce-trumpeting elephant. 
Such natives as lived in its vicinity were 
bound to be treacherous and unfriendly — for 
we had few cordial international relations in 
those days. Besides all this, there was the tor- 
ment of insect pests, the danger from malaria, 
lack of proper food, and so on and on. But 
the boys at the laboratory were wild to go. 
There was a glory in being a missionary of 



THOMAS A. EDISON 99 

science, beside which all dangers, disasters, 
and menaces paled. Nor was this ardor 
dampened when word came presently that the 
young man who had rushed off to the West 
Indies had died of yellow fever on the very 
day of his arrival. No less than four others 
immediately petitioned to be allowed to carry 
on his work! So very soon there were emis- 
saries from Edison in all quarters of the globe, 
and samples of bamboo and other fibrous 
plants began to arrive in great bales. People 
everywhere were interested in the quest, and 
not a few joined the hunt on their own ac- 
count, sending in generous samples of the rare 
specimens they found. 

It was William Moore, a New Jersey man, 
who finally located the species of bamboo 
which had started the search. Leaving New 
York in the summer of 1880, bound for China 
and Japan, a locality especially noted for 
bamboo, he traveled over some 30,000 miles, 
pushing his way far into the remote country 
districts, meeting with no end of exciting ex- 
periences and collecting hundreds of speci- 
mens, himself roughly testing those which he 
thought might do before sending them on to his 



100 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

chief. At last, in Japan, a species was chanced 
upon which seemed most fitting, and when 
word came confirming its excellence, Moore at 
once made a contract with an old Jap to sup- 
ply the fiber. This man was considerable of 
a plant wizard. He attacked the job with 
hearty interest, cultivating and cross-fertiliz- 
ing bamboo until he got exactly the quality 
that was required. 

None the less thrilling, but perhaps not so 
hazardous, was the experience of the other 
men who played a part in this "Romance of 
Science." None of them, however, found the 
wonder material, or indeed anything that quite 
came up to the bamboo which the old Jap was 
supplying. All in all, this world-wide search 
for filament material cost Edison around 
$100,000, and then, ere the last man reached 
home, the Wizard himself had figured out an 
artificial compound which seemed likely to be 
better than any natural product. No imme- 
diate change, however, was made in the fila- 
ments, but gradually the imports from Japan 
were cut down, and in a few years the bamboo 
had wholly given place to a manufactured 
product. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 101 

About ten years ago tungsten began to re- 
place all other filaments in the incandescent 
lamp. Then the average candle power per 
lamp was 19; to-day it is 52. Tungsten cuts 
the cost of the light about one-third and gives 
a steadier, more perfect illumination than the 
carbon-filament types. Two pounds of tung- 
sten will supply about 50,000 electric bulbs, 
for each filament is only 1-1200 of an inch in 
diameter. The current passing through the 
filament heats it to such an intense degree that 
the red rays are eliminated, and it is the red 
rays which make the ordinary electric light so 
hard on the eyes. 

Inventing the incandescent electric light 
was, as it turned out, a mere bagatelle com- 
pared with the herculean labors into which it 
at once plunged the Wizard. But he had f or- 
seen all this, and delighting as he always had 
in obstacles, their triumph was to him the keen- 
est enjoyment. And they also formed his 
chief reward ! For no sooner was the light an 
achieved success, than there sprang up a 
mushroom growth of inventors, each of whom 
labored under the delusion that he was the man 
who had invented the incandescent electric 



102 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

light. Prior claims rose like magic every- 
where. One indefatigable press-writer added 
to the turmoil by stating that the electric light 
had been in use as far back as the thirteenth 
century, and in proof thereof quoted from a 
volume of Sorcery and Magic, published in 
1852. 

From the first the public looked upon the in- 
candescent electric light with favor ; but it had 
two very stiff competitors — gas and the arc 
light, in which politics and finance were pretty 
heavily involved, and no end of bitter feeling 
was shown. Eventually, however, it was made 
clear, as Edison tried to point out in the be- 
ginning, that the incandescent light was not a 
hated rival which must be crushed. It did not 
seek to take the place of the arc light where 
that method was undoubtedly best and cheap- 
est, such as in the lighting of streets, factories, 
and large halls. This was a field in itself, as 
the continual growth and improvement of the 
arc light has proven. It did seek to supersede 
gas for ordinary indoor lighting purposes: 
why shouldn't it? It was incomparably better. 
And gas still had ample space for operation. 
Subsequently it was proven that the incandes- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 103 

cent lamp was actually a booster for the gas 
works, and to-day in most cities the two indus- 
tries are combined. 

All in all, Edison's incandescent light data 
fills some two hundred note books, set down in 
plain, unvarnished English, in the Wizard's 
fine copper-plate writing. And almost in the 
beginning of the first one, the "prospectus 
book," is an entry which says much, viz; Object 
of Incandescent Light: To effect exact imi- 
tation of all done by gas, so as to replace light- 
ing by gas by lighting by electricity. To im- 
prove the illumination to such an extent as to 
meet all requirements of natural, artificial and 
commercial conditions." 

A large program ! But one which never for 
a moment "stumped" the Wizard, notwith- 
standing the great number of obstacles which 
must be overcome in setting his system in oper- 
ation. As soon as possible after the discovery 
of the paper-carbon filament, a row of lamps 
was strung among the trees at Menlo Park, 
and the contest was on. Almost at once the 
attention of the world was attracted, and the 
visiting thousands found it wonderful indeed 
when told that one of the tiny lights — which 



104 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

needed no matches to set going — would burn 
day and night for more than a week, and in all 
that time the globe would not once get hot 
enough to burn one's fingers! More than all 
else, however, was the fact that the lamp would 
burn in any position, and that any lamp in the 
string might be turned on or off without inter- 
fering with the others. 

It was plain to all that this new light, free 
from odor, sputtering, and danger from lire, 
was the ideal home light. It promised no end 
of comfort, convenience and beauty, and they 
asked how they could go about to secure it. 
And for this the Wizard was ready. He had 
set his heart upon lighting the city of New 
York, by way of setting the ball rolling, and 
he presently invited the New York board of 
aldermen out one evening to see his exhibit. 
A special train was run for their benefit, and 
the effect of the hundreds of brilliant incandes- 
cent lamps glowing among the trees of Menlo 
Park was beautiful and remarkable in the ex- 
treme. It had a deep effect upon the visitors, 
just as Edison meant that it should, and he 
got what he wanted — permission to go ahead 



THOMAS A. EDISON 105 

and build a great central station where con- 
sumers might obtain electricity. 

Such a vista of problems as were now before 
him! To begin with, there was little that he 
could buy, or that anybody could make for him. 
Outside of his own laboratory there was no one 
who knew anything about incandescent electric 
lighting. Factories for the manufacture of 
new and novel apparatus — dynamos, switch- 
boards, pressure and current indicators, me- 
ters, lamps, underground conductors, service 
boxes, man-holes, specially made wire, and 
what not — must be built and equipped; arti- 
sans must be trained, for even among his most 
trusted men there were few who knew how to 
get a filament in place and exhaust a globe. 
He must, also, find just how much gas was 
used in New York, in order to determine the 
strength of station required, and this informa- 
tion, which of course the gas company would 
not supply, would have been for some difficult 
indeed to secure, but for Edison it was, as he 
says, "The simplest thing in the world!" He 
hired men to canvass the city, and make a note 
of the number of lights burning in the various 



106 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

days of the week. It was then easy to com- 
pute the problem. 

Having determined the strength of the sta- 
tion required, and the amount and cost of the 
materials necessary to put it in operation, he 
turned the financing of the matter over to his 
lawyer and warm personal advocate Governor 
P. Lowry, who eventually succeeded in raising 
the capital necessary, under the firm name of 
the New York Edison Illuminating Company, 
and the project was launched. Out at Menlo 
Park a lamp factory sprang into being ; over in 
Washington street, Kruesi set up the manu- 
facture of tubes; a second-rate machine shop 
was turned into a first-class dynamo estab- 
lishment; another man who had been making 
gas fixtures was glad to supply sockets and 
some other necessary parts. Then negotia- 
tions were begun for lots on which to build 
the station. Edison hoped that by buying in 
some out-of-the-way street the necessary site 
might be obtained fairly cheap. But New 
York real estate rose to alarming proportions, 
and finally two old buildings, not at all what 
he wanted, were bought for $150,000. Then 
the inventor faced the next difficulty. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 107 

He must have a big output of electricity, 
and being forced to put up with a small station, 
a high-speed engine would be a necessity. But 
there was none. Drafting what he thought 
would meet his requirements, Edison went to 
an engine factory to order a one hundred and 
fifty horse-power engine that would run seven 
hundred revolutions per minute. "It is im- 
possible !" said the manufacturers. But, after 
some argument, they finally agreed to build 
such an engine, and in time the ungainly thing 
arrived and was set up on a shale hill out at 
Menlo Park. Then such a hubbub as arose! 
The whole hill shook with the swift revolutions, 
and there was all kinds of mischief to pay. At 
length, however, the engine was tamed down to 
three hundred and fifty revolutions, which was 
all Mr. Edison really needed, and it seemed so 
easy-going and practical that five more engines 
were ordered. 

Various delays followed, but at length the 
order was filled and an attempt was then 
made to run two of them in parallel. And 
then chaos broke loose! "Of all the circuses 
since Adam was born we had the worst then," 
says Edison. "One engine would stop, and 



108 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

the other would run up to about a thousand 
revolutions, and then they would see-saw. 
What was the matter? One set of governors 
was running the other as a motor. I then 
put up a long shaft connecting all the gover- 
nors together and thought this would end the 
matter, but it didn't." 

Nor were they ever able to get these engines 
to work in satisfactory harmony. At length, 
Edison, feeling that "he didn't want his cus- 
tomers to count the heart-beats of his engine 
in the flicker of their lamps," was forced to go 
to another engine draughtsman, Gardiner C. 
Sims, who built him a one hundred and 
seventy-five horse-power engine, making three 
hundred and fifty revolutions. This proved to 
be what was needed. Indeed, there was small 
chance of its going wrong, for Mr. Edison 
had now made an exhaustive study of steam 
engines. He knew their weak points to date, 
and he was ready with suggestions to remedy 
them. One thing was a poser. No engine of 
the type they desired had ever been built for 
continuous running. The oil cup for self- 
lubricating was unknown; every four or five 
hours it was necessary to stop and oil up. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 109 

Edison said this wouldn't do; any engine to 
suit his purpose must keep going. Eventually 
Sims solved the problem with the drop-feed oil 
cup, a type of which is now generally used on 
all engines. 

At last all was ready. On Saturday night, 
September 4, 1882, the current was first turned 
on to the mains for regular light distribution 
in the city of "New York, and it stayed on for 
eight years with only one slight stoppage. One 
of the original Sims engines first put on the 
job ran twenty-four hours a day for three hun- 
dred and sixty-five days before it was stopped. 
Crude enough it was in many respects, but it 
did the work, and served as the father of the 
modern power-plant engine — another vast 
field which thus owes its rise to Edison. 

A glimpse of that first electric light station 
would be an eye-opener to the modern elec- 
trician. Few indeed of the instruments that 
now seem indispensable were to be had. There 
was not even a central switchboard! Each 
dynamo was controlled by its own individual 
switch. The feeder connections were all on the 
first floor at the front of the building, and the 
general voltage control apparatus was on the 



JIO FAMOUS AMERICANS 

floor above. "In those days we used the old 
chemical meters," wrote Edison, in an account 
published long ago in the Electrical Review, 
"and these gave us a lot of trouble, for, as 
they contained two jars of a liquid solution, 
there was always a danger of freezing in the 
cold weather. So I set to work to negative 
this difficulty and succeeded, as I thought, by 
putting an incandescent lamp in each meter 
with a thermostat strip, which would make 
a contact through the lamp when the tempera- 
ture fell to forty degrees. That idea, simple 
as it was, caused us a whole lot of trouble. The 
weather became cold, and then the telephone in 
our office began to ring every five minutes and 
people would say — 

" 'Our meter's red hot. Is that all right?' 
"Then someone else would call up and say, 
'Our meter's on fire inside, and we poured 
water on it. Did that hurt it?' 

"As to voltmeters, we didn't have any. We 
used lamps. And I hadn't much use for 
mathematicians either, for I soon found that I 
could guess a good deal closer than they could 
figure, so I went on guessing. We used to 
hang up a shingle nail, tie it on a string along- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 111 

side one of the feeders, and used that for a 
heavy current ammeter. It worked all right. 
When the nail came close to the feeder we 
screwed up the rheostat a little, and in this way 
kept the lamps looking about right." 

Eventually Edison worked out solutions to 
the various problems which interfered with the 
smooth running of his lighting system, but any- 
thing like the number of these would be hard 
even for the electrician of to-day to guess at : a 
fine copper thread to serve as a fuse wire for 
the prevention of short-circuiting ; instruments 
of one sort and another for measuring the cur- 
rent; the "three-wire" system; the "feed and 
main" idea; dynamos, motors, and engines; 
plans for underground wiring and for dis- 
tributing systems, their control and regulation ; 
the perfected incandescent lamp of to-day 
which will run twelve hundred hours; and so 
on and on. 

"Broad as the prairies and free in thought as 
the wind that sweeps them," Edison is yet 
"fussy" and exacting to a degree. Much of 
the work in giving light to the world might 
have been delegated to subordinates. But this 
was not the Wizard's way. Here, there and 



112 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

everywhere he superintended the work of in- 
stallation in person. Nor did he merely stand 
around and give orders ; day and night he lent 
a hand wherever it was needed, and always he 
was the busiest man on the job. No clock 
regulated his hours ; he stayed by until physical 
weariness absolutely compelled him to rest. 
Then, as often as not, he lay down on a pile 
of tubing in the cellar of the Pearl Street 
station. 

"It is worth pausing just a moment," we 
are told in Edison: His Life and Inventions, 
"to glance at this man taking a fitful rest on a 
pile of iron pipe in a dingy building. His 
name is on the tip of the world's tongue. Dis- 
tinguished scientists from every part of 
Europe seek him eagerly. He has just been 
decorated and awarded high honors by the 
French Government. He is the inventor of 
wonderful new apparatus, and the exploiter of 
novel and successful arts. The magic of his 
achievements and the rumor of what is being 
done have caused a wild drop in gas securities, 
and a sensational rise in his own electric light 
stock from $100 to $3,500 a share. Yet these 
things do not at all affect his slumber or his 



THOMAS A. EDISON 113 

democratic simplicity, for in that, as in every- 
thing else, he is attending strictly to business, 
'doing the thing that is next to him.' " 

But it was just this same careful attention 
to detail that spelled the Great Wizard's suc- 
cess. It needed an Edison not only to invent 
the incandescent electric light system, but to 
put it into working operation. And how won- 
derful have been the subsequent results! In 
the whole history of industrial progress there 
has been nothing to compare with the far- 
reaching sweep of the electric light. Twenty 
years after the invention of the incandescent 
lamp there were $750,000,000 invested in elec- 
tric light plants in the United States alone, 
while across the water the industry was ad- 
vancing in world-wide strides. To-day we can 
scarcely imagine what it would be to do with- 
out the conveniences of the modern electric 
lighting and power devices. They are the 
daily, unobtrusive but useful servants in every 
home. 



VIII 

THE KINET0SC0PE, OR MOVING PICTURE 
MACHINE 

If Edison had no greater claim to fame, it 
might still be said of him that he probably did 
more to interest and amuse the world than any 
other man. No sooner had he invented the 
phonograph and made music possible for the 
multitude, than his attention was attracted to 
another problem: 

"Surely," said he, "it ought to be possible to 
do for the eye what has been done for the ear 
— moving pictures should be entirely possible!" 

It was not a new idea. Indeed, we often 
hear it said that there is no new thing under 
the sun, and this is especially true when applied 
to "the movies." Though barely twenty years 
have elapsed since the unrolling of the first 
motion picture reel, the idea of motion pictures 
goes back to the old Egyptians and their crude 
picture writings. 

Long before Edison was born, a beginning 

114 



THOMAS A. EDISON 115 

of considerable moment in the moving picture 
art had been made. This was the invention of 
the zoetrope, or "wheel of life," an ingenious 
little toy, consisting of a disc painted over with 
pictures of some animal or figure, such as a 
boy skating, in various stages of motion. Un- 
derneath each picture was a narrow slit. By 
slipping the wheel on a pin and whirling it 
rapidly before a mirror, one might see through 
the openings the object represented, appar- 
ently moving forward by jumps. Often a very 
laughable and realistic effect was secured, as 
you may discover for yourself if you care to 
experiment. 

Simple as this contrivance was, from it came 
the suggestion of the magic lantern and the 
screen, and by and by somebody brought forth 
a scheme that was rich in possibilities. This 
was the method of passing a row of pictures 
between the light and the lantern lens, and by 
using a shutter to close the lens from the light 
for an instant, while the picture was slipped 
forward, to give the effect of motion. The 
success of this plan and of the zoetrope, of 
course, lay in moving the pictures fast enough 
to deceive the eye into thinking that it regis- 



J16 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

tered constant unbroken movement. In short, 
advantage was taken of a point which had long 
been known to scientists : 

"There is," said they, "such a thing as per* 
sistence of vision, or a habit of our brains tq 
see an object that is no longer there. This 
impression lasts about one-twenty-fourth of a 
second: if you can substitute the next picture 
in that time the eye will not detect the brief 
gap made by making the change." 

The problem, then, lay not in counterfeiting 
motion, but in taking exact pictures of things 
in motion. And this proved difficult indeed. 
For dry-plates and sensitized films were en- 
tirely unknown, and the wet-plates then used 
did not adapt themselves to speed. It seemed 
impossible to work out any sort of commercial 
scheme. 

At length, in 1878, Edward Muybridge, an 
English inventor living in San Francisco, hav- 
ing secured some fairly rapid wet-plates, con- 
ceived the idea of setting a number of cameras 
in a row, and taking successive pictures of a 
horse as it passed by. Later, following up this 
silhouette idea, he took pictures of various 
other animals, and of men running. Freakish 



THOMAS A. EDISON 117 

indeed were these pictures when viewed singly, 
but whirled rapidly on a large "wheel of life" 
they presented a fairly unbroken picture. The 
defect was that the screen mechanism, while it 
showed violent motion, yet registered no prog- 
ress — the object remaining always exactly in 
the center of the screen. 

Early in the next decade dry-plates were 
introduced. But still there was a decided 
handicap. The plates were heavy, and only a 
limited number could be used. "This difficulty 
will be more readily understood," says one 
authority, "when it is realized that a modern 
motion-picture play lasting fifteen minutes 
comprises about 16,000 separate and distinct 
photographs." Clearly there was no possi- 
bility of handling such a host of plates. What 
was to be done? 

"Ah!" mused Edison, standing now on 
the outskirts of the field and looking over the 
situation, "the thing promises to be decidedly 
interesting. In order to portray natural move- 
ment, pictures will have to be taken, say from 
forty to sixty per second. And the pictures 
once secured, a machine will be necessary to 
show them. I think I'll take a hand!" 



118 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

And this, notwithstanding that the problem 
involved a realm of science to which he was an 
absolute stranger — photography. He had not 
so much as taken a snapshot, or developed a 
plate ; had, in fact, hardly seen a camera. But 
this only made the problem more alluring ! 

"We shall never get anywhere with cumber- 
some glass plates, and a multiple of cameras," 
he decided shortly. "What we need is a film, 
capable of taking one impression after another 
in quick succession." 

Of course nothing of this sort was to be had, 
and the Wizard immediately added a photo- 
graphic laboratory to his establishment, and 
set in motion a train of experiments to secure 
what he wanted. From the first Edison felt 
that celluloid — originally known as Parkesine, 
from its inventor, Parkes — was the most likely 
material for films. Two difficulties, however, 
proved insurmountable barriers: it was not 
manufactured in thin enough sheets, and one 
of the substances used in developing ate up the 
celluloid. At this juncture, Charles East- 
man, the inventor of the Eastman kodak, who 
had been struggling with the film problem for 
five long years of the most indefatigable re- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 119 

search and endeavor, came forward with the 
first successful long strip of film. Now, in- 
deed, the way was open for the movies : for the 
celluloid film bears as much relation to the 
moving pictures of to-day as the petrol-motor 
does to the flying machine — it made success 
possible. Without the celluloid film, cinema- 
tography must have remained purely an ex- 
periment ; it could never have reached its pres- 
ent huge commercial importance. 

Now, all that remained was to devise a 
camera by means of which the required number 
of pictures per second could be taken, and this 
part of the problem would be solved. But do 
not imagine that this feat was as easy as it 
sounds ! All who have used a film camera will 
have some appreciation of the problem. To 
begin with, a long roll of film would have to 
pass so smoothly behind the lens, that at every 
inch it could be stopped, the shutter opened for 
exposure, then closed again, and the film 
passed on to the next halt. Moreover, this 
operation must be done rapidly, not less than 
twenty to forty times a second, and throughout 
a long length of say perhaps a thousand feet 
of film. 



120 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Who but an Edison would undertake such a 
problem, or guarantee at the outset that such a 
device could be made with sufficient exactness 
that each picture would join so perfectly one 
with another that continued motion would be 
shown? After much experimenting, however, 
the trick was turned; in the summer of 1889, 
the first modern motion picture camera came 
into being. From that day to this the Edison 
camera, with such improvements as time has 
developed, has been the accepted standard for 
securing pictures of objects in motion. 

With its invention, things took a lively turn 
at the Edison laboratories. "Black Maria," a 
studio painted black inside and out, was set up 
in the dooryard, and so arranged that it could 
be swung around to face the sunlight, which 
came in through a skylight in its sloping roof, 
and the boys posed to get pictures for their 
chief's working models. The machine for the 
portrayal of the pictures was yet to perfect. 
And such stunts as they pulled off! From 
Fred Ott's luxurious ear-splitting sneeze, with 
its ludicrous grimaces, on to somersaults, 
standing on their heads, wrestling, playing 
leap frog, dancing, feats of horsemanship, 



THOMAS A. EDISON 121 

divers working jobs, and what not, which pro- 
duced no end of interest and amusement for 
the force when thrown on the screen. Edison 
himself was asked to take his turn before the 
camera, but no amount of persuasion could get 
him to do it. 

Everyone is familiar with the Pathe feature 
photoplays. But few know that Charles 
Pathe was the first great pioneer in the moving 
picture world as we know it now. To him be- 
longs the honor of the first motion picture; 
feature, a scant two hundred feet in length, 
portraying the first story ever produced at a 
movie. To him also must be credited the pro- 
duction of the first comedy, the first drama, 
and the first of the long picture reels. More 
than fifteen years ago Pathe began repro- 
ducing in picture form the works of the great 
novelists and playwrights, and the story of the 
difficulties which he met and overcame, could 
they be set down here, would reveal the pro- 
gress in motion picture art. 

All this, however, would be setting the cart 
before the horse, which was in truth the real 
order of the development of the movies. First 
the pictures, and at length after many trials 



122 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

and failures, the machine for projecting them 
— the kinetoscope, as Edison christened it, but 
dubbed "the peep hole machine" by the boys 
and later by the people who saw it for the first 
time at the Chicago World's Fair. The pic- 
tures could be viewed by only one person at a 
time, and that through a "peep hole ;" further- 
more, there was a continuous movement, which 
at times caused the image to be both faint and 
blurred. An ingenious "toy" it seemed, with 
little or no future before it. 

But defective as it was, the kinetoscope yet 
had in it the germs essential to produce the 
modern motion picture machine, the cinemato- 
graph of to-day. The story, however, of the 
numerous improvements and inventions, the 
hours of puzzlement and groping, by which it 
was evolved, and the various people who had a 
hand in it first and last, is too long and compli- 
cated to tell here. Naturally it cost a good 
deal of money, and it is probable that this 
invention took at least a hundred thousand 
dollars to make it a commercial success, and as 
much more to get it going. Indeed, the Bronx 
Park (New York) studio of the Edison Com- 
pany, a magnificent structure built of glass, 



THOMAS A. EDISON 123 

with all the properties and stage settings of a 
regular theater, of itself cost nearly that sum, 
to say nothing of a second New York studio, 
not nearly so elaborate, and the numerous 
directors, actors, and minors necessary to pro- 
duce the introductory films. 

To-day photoplay has soared to heights un- 
dreamed by the inventor. And the reason is 
not far to seek, so wide and inexhaustible is 
the range of material. "Making the movies" 
opens up an interesting, and in some instances, 
at least, most profitable business. Nowadays 
parties setting out on hunting and exploring 
expeditions aim to make their motion picture 
outfits cover expenses and leave a comfortable 
balance besides. One man on a big African 
game tour is said to have netted $50,000; an- 
other, exploring in the Northern icefields, 
found himself, thanks to his motion picture 
camera, richer by $30,000. While in the 
studios of the various film companies are 
starred divers interesting careers, and oppor- 
tunities afforded to countless hundreds to make 
a livelihood. All this is another story, of 
course, but it shows the breadth of the ave- 
nues thrown open by Thomas A. Edison, and 



124 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

another indebtedness of the world to this man 
whose inquiring mind delighted in the upturn- 
ing of problems and their subsequent solution 
— the man who was never so pleased as when 
facing a serious difficulty. "It seemed to 
stiffen his backbone," said one of his co-work- 
ers, "and made him more prolific of new 
ideas." 



IX 

OTHER INTERESTING INVENTIONS 

Someone once asked Edison what he con- 
sidered the secret of achievement. His reply 
was terse and to the point: "Hard work, 
based on hard thinking." Certainly this is the 
foundation on which his own phenomenal suc- 
cess was built. He knew no idle moments. 
While on his trip to Wyoming with the astron- 
omers, in 1878, he got the idea of building an 
electric railway, and as soon as the tremendous 
rush into which the incandescent lamp plunged 
him had somewhat subsided, he began the con- 
struction of a stretch of track at Menlo Park, 
and at the same time started to build an electric 
locomotive to furnish the power. 

We have so long accepted electric railroads 
as a matter of course, that it is difficult now 
to understand how any engineering expert ever 
could have doubted their practicality. Yet 
such was the case. When Edison's short 
stretch of road — barely a third of a mile — was 

125 



126 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

opened for operation, May 3, 1880, the world 
again flocked to his door, but it took a stout 
heart to make an initial trip, for there were 
some steep grades and sharp curves in that 
brief course, and few had faith that the queer- 
looking locomotive would or could keep to the 
track. 

Certainly there was some cause for doubt. 
An odder looking train had never before 
been coupled together. The locomotive itself 
seemed such only by courtesy; it consisted of 
an ordinary flat car on a four-wheeled iron 
truck, with an Edison dynamo for a motor. 
One had to take on faith the statement that it 
had a capacity of twelve horse-power, and that 
electric current was generated at the machine 
shop, and carried to the rails by underground 
conductors. There were three cars: one flat 
freight car, one open awning-car, and another, 
a box-car, which the boys sportively called the 
"Pullman," on which Edison had fitted a sys- 
tem of electromagnetic braking. 

"I well remember," said the late Charles T. 
Hughes, who was Edison's chief assistant on 
the electric railway project, "a certain day 
when Mr. Henry Villard, of the Northern 



THOMAS A. EDISON 127 

Pacific, sent one of his mechanical engineers, 
Mr. J. C. Henderson, to see the road in opera- 
tion. Edison, Henderson, and I rode on the 
locomotive. Edison ran it, and just after we 
started there was a trestle sixty feet long and 
seven feet deep, and Edison put on all the 
power. When we went over it we must have 
been going forty miles an hour, and I could 
see the perspiration come out on Henderson. 
After we got over the trestle and started on 
down the track, Henderson said: 'When we 
go back I will walk. If there is any more of 
that kind of running I won't be in it myself.' ' 

And this seemed to be the sentiment gen- 
erally! Few engineers could see utility and a 
future in electricity for transportation, and 
their doubts were shared by the capitalists to 
such an extent that it was several years before 
the project had any show whatever for busi- 
ness. Edison, however, knew that it was 
bound to come, and he went on improving the 
scheme, planning a low-cost storage battery, 
and taking out a great number of patents, 
many of which showed foresight when the elec- 
trifying of streets began in real earnest. 

To-day the initial electric railway of the 



128 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

world lies in ruin and decay in the general 
desertion of Menlo Park, but the locomotive 
which finally succeeded in demonstrating its 
worth has become the property of the Pratt 
Institute, of Brooklyn, and here in prominent 
display it preaches to the students a wordless 
and incentive sermon of faith and never say 
fail 

"Not long after the kinetoscope had got 
under way, Edison happened one day to be 
walking along the seashore, when he came 
across a patch of black sand, not unlike gun- 
powder in appearance. Of course a query at 
once bobbed up, and he carried home a pocket- 
ful to see what its composition was. As he 
poured it out upon the table, a passing work- 
man accidentally dropped a big magnet across 
the heap. At once, the tiny black grains 
which had been mixed with the sand immedi- 
ately left it and clung to the magnet. Exami- 
nation proved the black grains to be the very 
purest of magnetic iron. 

"Ah," said Edison, slowly, turning over in 
his mind the train of ideas which the incident 
had set in motion, "I believe magnetic attrac- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 129 

tion could be employed to separate metal from 
low grade ores." 

The more he thought about the project the 
more feasible it seemed. Straightway he 
began to block out a scheme that ultimately 
resulted in what is now known as the magnetic 
ore separator. But, like most of his other in- 
ventions, this feat sounds easier in telling than 
it was in doing. As a matter of fact, the 
Wizard put nine solid years into this labor, 
inventing not only the ore separator but a tre- 
mendous amount of new and novel machinery 
to aid in its operation, including gigantic 
crushers and pulverizers for tearing down the 
mountains bodily and reducing them to pow- 
der, and marvelous conveyors, which wound in 
and out, turning corners here and yonder, 
delivering material from one bin to another, 
making a number of loops in the drying-oven, 
filling up bins, and passing on to the next one 
when full, with an automatic action which 
seemed almost human in intelligence, and 
spoke volumes for the inventor's genius and 
engineering skill. 

Last but not least, Edison crowned his 
labors by building the little town of Edison, in 



130 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Sussex County, New Jersey — a town that 
shortly came to be known as the most up-to- 
date mining town in America. People came 
from far and near to see in operation the 
immense magnetic ore separators. There were 
nearly five hundred of them in the plant, turn- 
ing out something like two hundred and fifty 
tons of finished product per hour — and to ad- 
mire the model homes of the miners, lighted by 
electricity and fitted with all modern con- 
veniences. Here, in the vicinity of Edison, the 
Wizard held 16,000 acres, his pick of the ore 
regions, secured by a marvelous survey of 
country twenty-five miles in width and from 
Canada to North Carolina. And here, in the 
3,000 acres immediately surrounding the mills, 
it was estimated there were over 200,000,000 
tons of low-grade ore — enough to supply the 
whole United States iron trade, including 
exports, for seventy years! A vast source of 
wealth in hillc and mountains that had been 
hitherto regarded as waste land! 

And then came the first hitch in the proceed- 
ings. When the separated ore was put on the 
market in quantity, it was found that few fur- 
naces could handle it in powder form. An- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 131 

other invention would be necessary to make it 
available, but this did not trouble the Wizard 
for long. He solved the problem by making a 
machine for molding the powdered ore into 
"briquettes." Now the great rocks went in 
at one end of the works, and a stream of 
briquettes, at the rate of sixty per minute, 
poured out at the other. Moreover, the trade 
approved of the handy briquettes, and orders 
came in most gratifyingly. Hard work, per- 
sistence and deep thought had conquered. Fot 
five years Edison had scarcely been at his 
home in Orange, only on Sundays, so deep and 
perplexing had been the difficulties that he was 
obliged to meet and overcome. 

Just as everything seemed exceedingly 
bright and promising, and the Wizard was 
beginning to look about him for a new field of 
endeavor, suddenly out of a clear sky came a 
fatal bolt. Rich mines of pure Bessemer ore 
had been opened in Minnesota; this product 
began to flood the market at a price that 
absolutely killed Edison's manufactured ore — 
$3.50 a ton against $6.50. It was useless to 
go on, and the Wizard faced the hard fate that 
had taken so many arduous years of labor and 



132 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

some two millions or more of funds all for 
naught. 

The magnetic ore separator was not a total 
loss, however. It is still considered the hest 
and simplest method of separating iron from 
low-grade ore, and is in use in many parts of 
the world. 

Now, if ever, Edison showed his true 
caliber. "No use crying over spilled milk," 
said he. And in the very same moment that 
he ordered his works shut down, and turned 
his back upon the doomed town of Edison for- 
ever, he was actively engaged in figuring what 
to do next. It was imperative that some 
money-making enterprise be set afloat at once; 
for the ore-crushing plant had borrowed heav- 
ily, and Edison proposed to see every debt 
paid. 

Two things seemed most feasible. He 
would salvage what he could of the ore- 
machinery and turn it to account in making 
Portland cement — a project which he had been 
contemplating for some time ; and he would get 
out a storage battery which did not use lead 
and sulphuric acid. 

"Surely," he said, "nothing is more needed 



THOMAS A. EDISON 133 

than the latter invention. I don't think nature 
would be so unkind as to withhold the secret of 
a good storage battery, if a real earnest hunt 
for it is made. I'm going to hunt." 

Thus, with every thought fixed on the 
future, Edison was soon too busy to bemoan 
the past. Shortly he was engaged in reading 
up everything he could find on cement, and 
convinced himself that, with the splendid 
crushing machinery he had on hand and some 
further inventions which he knew he could 
make, he would have no difficulty in putting 
out a finer cement product than was on the 
market. The next thing was to find a suitable 
location for the plant, and the money to finance 
it. While these were pending he experimented 
with the storage battery. 

First, with true Edisonian logic, he made a 
study of the storage batteries then known, to 
number their defects, thus arriving at a definite 
idea for his own invention — "a battery that 
should be cheap, light, compact, mechanically 
strong, absolutely permanent, and generally 
fool proof." Qualifications, perhaps, that 
mean little to us, but which, in truth, 
were to call out "more original thought, work, 



134. FAMOUS AMERICANS 

perseverance, ingenuity, and monumental 
patience," according to one of his biographers, 
than any invention which he had yet tackled. 
Indeed, says this authority, "if Edison's 
experiments, investigations, and work on this 
storage battery were all that he had ever done, 
I should say that he was not only a notable 
inventor, but also a great man. It is almost 
impossible to appreciate the enormous diffi- 
culties that have been overcome." 

Edison had determined not to make an acid 
battery, and so, in the very beginning he was 
literally plunged in the dark and absolutely 
without guide posts of any kind. What alka- 
line should be used as an electrolyte, and what 
should be the character of the active agents 
used? He had no idea what materials to com- 
bine, and at least ten thousand trials were 
made without securing even a hint. Any one 
but an Edison would have given up in 
despair. To the Wizard, however, the failure 
of one experiment simply meant something 
else that he had eliminated, and he was that 
much nearer his goal. 

Seeing presently that he was apt to run the 
whole gamut of chemical elements, he estab- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 135 

lished a plant at Silver Lake, New Jersey, and 
settled down to a day and night contest. And 
here, in time, it was found that theoretically 
iron and nickel possessed the desired proper- 
ties; but how to get these elements into a 
proper condition of activity for practical stor- 
age battery purposes was a problem which took 
countless experiments — years indeed of hopes 
and fears, of many disappointments, and of 
final successful realization. At last came the 
Edison cell, containing a solution of potash, in 
which were immersed steel plates containing 
oxide of iron and oxide of nickel. 

In connection with the storage battery, as 
with other of his inventions, no end of ma- 
chines and processes had to be designed and 
built for the quick and easy manufacture and 
assembly of the various parts, to say nothing 
of all manner of rigid tests that the Wizard 
designed to bring the work up to the high 
degree of perfection which he had set as the 
model of efficiency. And throughout it all he 
never once lost hope nor patience, sure at all 
times that victory was just around the corner, 
and that he had only to persevere to win the 
ultimate goal. 



136 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Work upon this invention had to be set aside 
many times. Edison always had countless 
irons in the fire, and those were especially busy 
years. One thing, at first, kept continually 
bobbing up — the cement problem. Just as he 
got deeply on the trail of the possibilities of 
iron and nickel, he was advised that everything 
was now ready for the engineers to lay out the 
plans for the cement works. 

"Humph!" said Edison, "I intend to do 
that myself," and set busily to work with pen 
and paper. 

All day and all night and sometime into the 
afternoon of the next day, he planned and 
blocked, until at length there was before him 
the full specifications for the plant, which was 
subsequently built on just those lines. More- 
over, it is said that if to-day it were necessary 
to rebuild these immense works, no vital 
change would be necessary. Taken altogether 
this was an engineering feat which grows mar- 
velous indeed, when we remember that Mr. 
Edison was a novice at the business. None 
else but the Wizard could in twenty-four 
hours' planning have provided without an 



THOMAS A. EDISON 137 

error or oversight of any sort for that half- 
mile series of buildings and machinery ar- 
rangements, including not only the crushing, 
mixing, weighing, grinding, drying, screening, 
sizing, burning, packing and storing of the 
finished product, but for an extensive system 
of smaller details : such as a subway extending 
from one end of the plant to the other for 
carrying the steam, water and air pipes and 
the electrical conductors; a system of needle 
valves and clever gravity and filter contriv- 
ances by which two men can manage the auto- 
matic oiling of the tens of thousands of bear- 
ings throughout the plant; and another 
marvelous arrangement for accurately weigh- 
ing out the proportions of cement-rock and 
limestone. The latter, Edison figured, was 
an item altogether too important to be left 
to human agency, so thoroughly and so accu- 
rately must it be done. No guesswork or hap- 
hazardness could possibly be permitted, if uni- 
form results were to prevail. 

"Suppose," said he, "that the man at the 
scales should get to thinking of the other fel- 
low's best girl. Fifty or a hundred pounds 



138 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

of rock, more or less, wouldn't make much 
difference to him, but it would play havoc with 
the uniformity of the product." 

So he devised a hopper-fed scale which is 
set at certain figures, so that, the moment the 
scale-beam tips, an electrical connection auto- 
matically shuts off the stream of rock and 
limestone, coming each in a certain quantity 
from its own bin, and no more can be run until 
the load is moved. 

Cement-rock and limestone are crushed and 
mixed together, then pulverized to the last de- 
gree and burned in a kiln to form cement. It 
comes out in the shape of balls or "clinkers," 
about the size of lump sugar, which must again 
be ground and screened to the finest possible 
degree before the finished cement is ready to 
be bagged and barreled by machinery for the 
market. By the early methods, kilns were in- 
variably built with a capacity for turning out 
about two hundred barrels of clinkers every 
twenty-four hours. This seemed too slow. 
Edison decided to build kilns with a capacity 
of one thousand barrels every twenty-four 
hours — a determination that old cement 
makers considered a colossal bluff. How 



THOMAS A. EDISON 139 

could he — a man who never in his life had made 
a single barrel of cement — jump into the very 
heart of things and increase the production 
four hundred per cent? He would fall down 
hard, that was all! 

"Humph!" said Edison. And he went 
ahead, building huge cylindrical shells or 
kilns, one hundred and fifty feet long, of cast 
iron lined with fire-brick. These, however, 
when put into service, fell terribly short of 
the mark set, though they doubled the number 
of barrels the old style kilns were turning out 
in the same length of time. But in the end the 
Wizard triumphed ; indeed he went one better, 
succeeding in turning out eleven hundred bar- 
rels instead of one thousand as he had first 
sought to do. 

This chapter grows long, but we should fail 
to show the wide scope of Edison's genius if 
we closed the list of interesting inventions 
without mention of his typewriters, mimeo- 
graphs, electric pens, addressing machines, 
compressed-air apparatus, methods of pre- 
serving fruit, wire-drawing, circuit directors, 
and telegraph signaling apparatus, among the 



140 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

more than thousand inventions and patents 
which are set down officially to his credit. 

In this connection it is interesting to note 
Edison's term, "invention." Some things that 
are commonly covered by this word are, he 
tells us, mere "discoveries" or "scratches" — 
something that might have been revealed to 
anybody. The phonograph was a "scratch," 
he avers; so, too, was the motograph or chalk 
telephone receiver. But how many men, think 
you, would have had the inventive genius to 
have gone on and developed the "scratch"? 
The "scratches" in Edison's list were few. 
For the most part, his inventions were born 
of hard thinking, close application, and a per- 
sistence that was not satisfied until a tri- 
umphant goal was reached. 

"Edison," said one of his admirers once 
upon a time, "could unerringly pick out the 
most perfect pebble on the beach." 

And so he could! But it would not have 
been an instantaneous Wizard-like process. 
He would have made a careful, painstaking 
sorting of the pebbles one by one. It was in 
this manner that most of his inventions were 
developed. Any door that was double-locked 



THOMAS A. EDISON 141 

or barred with a "no admittance" tag had the 
strongest possible attraction for him. There 
was no such word as "fail" in his dictionary. 

Two inventions of Edison's, the tasimeter 
and the odoroscope have been invaluable in 
the world of astronomy and hydrography. 
The former has already been mentioned as of 
value in measuring the distance of the plane- 
tary bodies. It is also of extreme service in 
determining heat rays. The odoroscope is 
likewise particularly sensitive to heat and to 
moisture. It is useful in determining the pres- 
sure of gases and vapor, and its principles 
are active in the making of barometers, hy- 
drometers and such instruments. Edison has 
also invaded the world of medicine, having 
produced in his laboratory, primarily for the 
relief of a friend suffering from gout, a rem- 
edy that is now universally used in the treat- 
ment of that disease, and which came into 
being because the Wizard doubted the state- 
ment that uric acid was insoluble. It was a 
closed door that must be unbarred. 

Mention has been made elsewhere of the 
"Notion Books" which went hand in hand with 
all of his inventions. These volumes — plain 



142 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

ordinary blank books originally — numbering 
upwards of one thousand, are kept on the open 
shelves of his library, and are free to the in- 
spection of all those who are permitted the 
intimacy of the house. Here in these pages in 
his own handwriting, are to be found the in- 
ventor's ideas, sketches, and memoranda, not 
only on the inventions which have been made 
patent to the world, but on countless other 
lines that he touched upon and jotted down to 
be taken up at a later day — material enough, 
it is said, to fill several life-times — and here, 
better than elsewhere, can be seen the great 
range and activities of the Wizard's mind, 
which was, as one of his co-workers pointed 
out, a thing that defied cold print, and that, 
indeed, could scarcely be comprehended, even 
by those who were in daily association with 
him. 

Always before begimiing to work on any 
subject, Edison studied all that was to be 
known about it. Then, more likely than not, 
he started just at the point where authorities 
agreed that no entrance could be made. In 
consequence, he reaped a reward where others 
failed. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 143 

"Edison could find more ways of doing a 
thing than any man I ever knew," said one of 
his staff. And he cited an instance which oc- 
curred during the ore-works period. One of 
the engineers had come to Edison with a draw- 
ing concerning the installation of a certain 
piece of machinery. 

"It is surely awkward enough," observed 
the chief, at the first glance. 

"I know it," the engineer replied; "but 
there is absolutely no other way for it." 

"Humph," grunted the Wizard, "do you 
mean to tell me the thing can be done in no 
other way?" 

"I certainly do," returned the man. 

Edison said no more, but the next day he 
silently laid a sheet of paper on the engineer's 
desk, showing forty-eight different ways to 
solve the problem ! 

Naturally, the wide scope of the inventor's 
genius furnished unblushing space-writers 
with a vast amount of copy from time to time. 
For instance, there was the tale of his attempt 
to illuminate the heavens, which came out 
shortly after his exhibition of the electric 



1U FAMOUS AMERICANS 

lamps at Menlo Park. It was averred that 
what people thought was the evening star was 
none other than an electric lamp Edison had 
sent up in an invisible balloon! 

Another equally absurd, but just as widely 
believed report, was to the effect that the Wiz- 
ard had practically completed a device for 
melting snow as fast as it fell. "This," said 
ihe versatile liar, "will make many a city boy, 
who has to shovel snow from the sidewalk, very 
happy, but it will at the same time rob many 
a poor man of a meal that he would otherwise 
get for doing that work. The invention will 
have its greatest utility in clearing transcon- 
tinental railway tracks." 

Another "news" item, more ludicrous per- 
haps than either of these just mentioned, was 
a fictitious report, by one of the disgruntled 
reporters whose card under the door was dis- 
regarded, to the effect that Edison had just 
invented an extremely practical shirt, which 
was shortly to be placed on the market. This 
remarkable garment had a bosom composed 
of 365 shining layers, and was designed to last 
a year — all that was necessary for the wearer 
to present an immaculate front each morning, 



THOMAS A. EDISON 145 

being just to strip off the soiled top layer. 
Edison himself, it was claimed, had worn one 
of these shirts many months, and considered 
it one of the most useful of his many inven- 
tions. That there were men to whom such a 
shirt would appeal was soon proved by the 
letters, enclosing checks for a supply, that 
came pouring in from all quarters of the globe, 
until the office was fairly swamped, and the 
inventor became so wroth that he declared if 
he had hold of the author of the much-copied 
skit, he "wouldn't need a shirt or anything 
else on his back for some time." 



X 



X 

EDISON AND HIS WORKMEN 

Someone has said that there is only one 
thing Edison could not do: he could not stop 
work. He himself put it naively, "I shouldn't 
care to loaf!" Year in, year out, time was un- 
noted, sleep forgotten, food untouched, and 
rest practically unknown, while he pursued 
some elusive problem. And so miraculous was 
his resistance that he looked twenty years 
younger than his age, at seventy-five, and 
could still work twenty-four hours at a 
stretch if need be, without feeling the strain. 
Thus he perhaps failed in being able to under- 
stand any lack of endurance in others. 

"I have often felt," says Mr. Upton, Edi- 
son's mathematician in the memorable work 
at Menlo Park, "that Mr. Edison never could 
comprehend the limitations of the strength of 
other men, as his own physical and mental 
strength have always seemed to be without 
limit. He could work continuously as long 

146 






THOMAS A. EDISON 147 

as he wished, and go to sleep the instant he 
closed his eyes. . . . He always kept his mind 
direct and simple, going straight to the root 
of troubles." 

And well might Upton add this last remark : 
for the Wizard was prone to check up the 
work he required of his mathematician in a 
very practical manner. Here is a case in 
point. One day Edison appeared at Upton's 
office with a pear-shaped bulb in hand — the 
forerunner of the electric light glob 

"Please calculate the cubic contents of this 
thing in centimeters," said he. 

It was an abstruse problem, but Upton was 
as much a genius at figures as his employer 
was at invention. The more difficult a solu- 
tion, the better he enjoyed it. He had taken 
a degree at Princeton and finished in Germany 
under Helmholtz, the renowned juggler of in- 
tegral and differential equations. So he went 
to work with skilful ease, drawing out the 
shape of the bulb on paper and getting an 
equation of its fines. Before he had half fin- 
ished, however, Edison was back for the an- 
swer. 

"Huh!" said he, when he had taken note of 



148 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

the elaborate proceedings, "I would simply 
take that bulb and fill it with mercury. Then 
weigh it, and from the weight of the mercury 
and its specific gravity, I'd get it in five min- 
utes." 

"A pretty good guesser," Edison styled 
himself, by way of accounting for his rare abil- 
ity of arriving instantaneously at correct solu- 
tions, and he has had many a long and vic- 
torious wrangle with those who sought to pit 
their mathematical deductions against his com- 
mon sense. "The greatest bugbear I had to 
contend with in building the Central Electric 
Light Station," he tells us, "were the mathe- 
maticians. My first dynamos were all built 
on guesswork. And they came pretty gen- 
erally up to the required power !" 

Guessing and rule o' thumb methods, how- 
ever, are fit procedures only for a Wizard. 
And the same held true of Edison's whole 
method of work. He was more likely to be 
found hard at it in his laboratory at midnight 
than at midday. The hours of the day and the 
days of the week did not enter into his sched- 
ule. His heaviest work in the way of inven- 
tions was done at night. It was then that the 



THOMAS A. EDISON 149 

best ideas came to him. Nor was this because 
of the quiet of the surroundings — there was no 
such thing as quiet around his laboratory. Al- 
ways he maintained day and night shifts, and 
the place resounded with ceaseless bustle and 
activity at all hours. From much of the hub- 
bub, however. Edison's deafness mercifully 
freed him, and he further possessed the rare 
and wonderful gift of absolute concentration. 
He could settle upon some one point and re- 
main fixed, though the house were to tumble 
in ruins about him. 

This same habit of concentration, coupled 
with an extremely active "forgetting," often 
got the Wizard into rather laughable compli- 
cations. The story is told that once upon a 
time the inventor went down to the town hall 
to pay his taxes, and finding himself one of a 
long line of strangers, he soon fell into a brown 
study over a certain problem which was puz- 
zling him. Mechanically stepping up as the 
one in front moved on, he presently found 
himself in front of the official, who asked his 
name; and for the life of him Edison could 
not tell! Whether he would have recollected 
is not known, for as he stood, red and con- 



150 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

fused, a gentleman stepped up and held out 
his hand, "Tom Edison, how are you?" he 
cried, and the difficulty was over. 

On another occasion, Mr. Bachelor took ad- 
vantage of this combination to work a fine 
practical joke on his employer. The Wizard 
had been working for several hours on a cer- 
tain problem, and having reached the limit of 
endurance had stretched out on a table, with 
two books for a pillow, and gone instantly to 
sleep, first giving orders to be wakened at nine 
o'clock with breakfast on hand. Mr. Bach- 
elor, coming into the room shortly before that 
hour to eat a breakfast which he himself had 
ordered, smiled to himself over the remnants 
of the meal and rose to immediate action when 
Edison's basket appeared. Carefully bundling 
it and his own dishes out of sight, he turned 
on the "calmer." This was an instrument 
usually used to stop the collapsed fellow- 
worker from snoring. It consisted of a broad 
ratchet-wheel, with a crank, into the teeth of 
which played an elastic slab of wood. Turned 
with a quick motion, the racket it produced 
was worse than a cyclone. Not even Mr. Edi- 
son's deafness was proof against it. Rising 



THOMAS A. EDISON 151 

with the perfect equanimity that is always his, 
he turned toward the impromptu breakfast 
table, and was told that his meal would be 
forthcoming shortly. Being still very sleepy, 
the Wizard promptly dozed off while he sat 
waiting. Quietly Mr. Bachelor placed the 
remnants of his own breakfast before the Wiz- 
ard, and then made a noise that roused him. 
Seeing the empty dishes, Mr. Edison straight- 
ened up, regarded them absently, and taking 
out his after breakfast cigar sat down to enjoy 
his usual smoke, entirely oblivious of the fact 
that he had not broken fast at all. 

Apropos of Edison's evenness of temper, 
one of his biographers states that "No man 
in the laboratory has ever seen Edison 'let 
himself go' ; and though his eyes may take on 
the sternness of a Napoleon, his anger never 
expresses itself outwardly." He had, more- 
over, a considerable executive ability, and a re- 
markable faculty for handling abrupt situa- 
tions. In the old days of the Pearl Street 
power house, the experts who had been trained 
to seal the filaments into the globes formed a 
union, and knowing that it was impossible to 
manufacture lamps without them, took on all 



152 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

sorts of airs. The manager found it almost 
impossible to control them, and he went to 
Edison saying that something had to be done. 
"Rest easy," said the chief, "I've seen this com- 
ing." And the manager returned content. 
Presently, because he refused to tolerate and 
reinstate a smart- Aleck whom he had fired, 
the union notified Edison that they were going 
to quit. "Very well," said Edison, calmly, 
"that will be all right!" And the nonplussed 
men, taken at their word, could do no less 
than make good on it. Then the Wizard 
quietly brought down from the loft some ma- 
chines which he had invented to take their 
places, and the discomfited union stayed out 
forever ! 

Illustrative further of Edison's calm tem- 
perament and unfailing patience, and the fact 
that it was impossible to ruffle him, the follow- 
ing tale has been many times repeated. For 
days an experiment had been going on which 
required the use of dozens of large tumblers. 
In one experiment alone over four hundred 
of these had been destroyed, and the experi- 
ment itself had proven a complete failure. 



THOMAS A. EDISON 153 

"Well, Mr. Edison," said his tired assistant, 
hoping against hope that this would be the 
end, "what shall we do next?" 

"Well," returned Mr. Edison, disturbed in 
his thoughts for the moment, and looking re- 
flectively at the mountain of broken glass, "I 
guess the next thing will be to get some more 
tumblers I" 

In one of the main rooms in the laboratory 
at Orange is the stockroom, where everything 
that could possibly be used in scientific experi- 
ments may be found, and some of it in quanti- 
ties that will last for years. It is an aston- 
ishing place, long and narrow and quite high, 
with thousands and thousands of small draw- 
ers reaching from the floor to the roof. And 
judging from the labels on these drawers 
what could even a wizard hope to do with such 
an odd assortment? Needles, shells, maca- 
roni, teeth, bones, hoofs, resin, glass, feathers, 
peacock's tails, gums, every kind of rope, wire, 
twine, and cord, varnish and oils of all sorts, 
skins, human and animal hair, ten thousand 
or more chemicals, and in short, almost every 
known thing under the sun. Time was when 



154 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

new employees were attracted to the standing 
offer of a prize for the mention of any sub- 
stance used in science that was not among 
those present. Now only the merest green- 
horn thinks he can add to the list ! 

One of the first essentials which Edison re- 
quired in a workman was that he be able "to 
keep his tongue between his teeth." Always 
there are secrets in the laboratory that must 
be guarded, and did his workmen gossip about 
affairs outside, the trend of his investigations 
would soon be known, and no end of harm be 
worked thereby. There was one room, Edi- 
son's sanctum, which no one might enter 
without permission, and thereby hangs an- 
other tale. 

One day a new boy was hired to guard this 
door. He was taken in hand by one of "the 
boys" and instructed very seriously as to the 
nature of his duties. He was a zealous lad, 
who had been most carefully chosen, and he 
took up his work full to the brim of its impor- 
tance. Shortly after he had mounted on duty, 
along came a shabbily-dressed man in a yellow 
duster, who essayed to brush past him with 
only a cheery "Hello!" 



THOMAS A. EDISON 155 

Instantly the boy had the stranger by the 
arm: "You can't go in there," he said posi- 
tively. 

"Why not?" asked the man, regarding him 
keenly. 

"Because that's Mr. Edison's room — the 
place where he does his most special thinkin' 
and inventin'. No one can go in without a 
written permission, else he sends out for 'em." 

"I see," said the man. He turned quickly 
away, and presently came back with the man 
who had trained the boy. 

"Bill," said that worthy hurriedly, himself 
no little excited and confused, "what is the 
matter with you? This man you have kept 
out is Mr. Edison! I'm surprised " 

But he got no further. The chief stopped 
him instantly. "I won't have the boy scolded 
for doing exactly what you told him to do," 
he said laughingly. "He's a boy after my 
own heart, and I'm sure he is going to be just 
the fellow we want here." 

Often people of note and friends of Edi- 
son's of life-long standing felt themselves 
aggrieved at the iron-clad rule of No Disturb- 
ance when he had a knotty problem on hand. 



156 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

Not one of his employees, however, dared dis- 
regard this placard, and the keeper of the door 
was often put to his wits' end of diplomacy. 
One day a very pompous gentleman chose to 
be particularly irate at what he regarded as 
the office boy's over-caution. 

"Look here," he said, severely, "Tom Edi- 
son and I were pals, years ago. I know he 
will be glad to see me. I should say so ! Let 
me pass, boy. I'll vouch for you, and no 
trouble will result. There isn't any one 
around here knows Edison as well as I do." 

"I don't know about that," returned the lad 
shrewdly. "Mrs. Edison was here this morn- 
ing, and after waiting for two hours had to 
go away without seeing him. Orders is or- 
ders. You'll have to wait!" 

One thing Edison would not tolerate among 
his employees was a dreamer. Dreams are 
impractical things, and seldom the output of 
the man who hustles. Neither is a genius a 
requisite. According to the Wizard's way of 
thinking, there is more in an ounce of perse- 
verance than in a pound of genius. "Genius," 
says the proverb, "is an infinite capacity for 
taking pains." Edison had a much better defi- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 157 

nition. "Genius," said he, "is two per cent 
inspiration, and ninety-eight per cent per- 
spiration." And all those who have gone any 
distance up the ladder of fame and fortune 
agree with him. 

"Some inventors are horn," said Edison, 
"but a lot more of them are made." And as 
proof of this he pointed with pride to the long 
list of Edison employees who have themselves 
become inventors of renown. 

Recently the world was considerably stirred 
over the publication of a list of examination 
questions which Edison had submitted to a 
host of applicants. Only thirty of the five 
hundred passed through the ordeal with colors 
flying, and there was a general f eeling among 
those who failed — college graduates, most of 
them — that the test had not been fair. For 
the Wizard was not content with sticking to 
general text-books and the subject in hand: 
"He roamed up and down the ages, invaded 
a dozen arts and sciences and ranged the heav- 
ens from the sun to Betelgeuse. There was 
no complaint because he asked, Who was 
Leonidas ? But when he sought to fathom the 
mysteries of the Chinese windlass, and de- 



158 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

manded to be told the kind of wood kerosene 
barrels are made of, his college critics felt 
that he was not playing the game according 
to their rules. There was no harm in asking, 
Who was Plutarch? But to make the same 
inquiry in regard to the late Mr. Bessemer 
was a very different matter." 

And what was the inventor's object? Sim- 
ply to test, not only what the young men had 
learned in school, but what they had learned 
out of it. Were they satisfied entirely with 
their college degree, or did they keep up a 
course of outside reading, covering the more 
recent developments of science, invention and 
the arts? Progress was ever Mr. Edison's 
watchword. Broad as the plains in his own 
thought and interests, and quick to branch out 
into new trails, no one knew better than he 
that the man who is not ever studying and 
reading has lost something invaluable — the 
first sharp craving to learn. Such a man has 
no future : "A vital something in him has died, 
and his intellectual finish is not far off." 

Always Edison exhibited plain common- 
sense and originality in testing men. When 
J. H. Vail, of the old trusted Menlo Park 



THOMAS A. EDISON 159 

staff, first appeared before Edison, he had the 
nerve to apply for the job of overseer in the 
dynamo-room. The chief looked him over 
quizzically and then with a curious little glint 
in his eye, led him to a pile of junk heaped in 
a corner. 

"Put that together," he said, "and let me 
know when it is running." 

"All right, sir," said the would-be overseer 
promptly, and he hung up his coat and went 
to work. "I didn't have a shadow of an idea 
what I was up against," he said later. "But 
I got a liberal education finding out. The 
mess proved to be a dynamo. And when I 
had it together and in fine running order I 
got the job." 

Edison was often criticized as tyrannical to 
a degree. He was, indeed, painstakingly ex- 
acting. His business required every expendi- 
ture of patience and care. With the man who 
exercised thought and showed a desire to do 
i well, he had unlimited patience. It was to 
the careless, indifferent, and lazy individual 
that he was a terror for the short time they 
were permitted to stay with him. 



160 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

"Why did you let so and so go?" he was 
once asked. 

"Oh," replied the Wizard, soberly enough, 
"he was so slow that it would take him half an 
hour to get out of the field of a microscope L" 



XI 

EDISON AND THE PUBLIC 

"A thoroughly comfortable and undeniably 
human man," — this was the characterization 
long ago applied to Edison, and no coinage 
of words could suit him more admirably. Says 
one of his biographers, "Those portraits, so 
f amiliar to all, showing the inventor with his 
head resting upon his hand, and a solemn, 
dreamy look in his eyes, as he listens to the 
phonograph, are all wrong. Edison is the 
exact reverse of a dreamer, and always has 
been — he never gives himself time to dream, 
and his chief characteristics through life have 
been marvelous alertness, indomitable deter- 
mination, and mercurial energy. His eyes are 
more often laughing with suppressed humor 
than solemn with thought. When he was a 
young man, and no one knew him, he was 
shy in disposition and seldom spoke of him- 
self or his doings. When he became famous, 

161 



162 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

he did not 'grow out of proportion to him- 
self,' but was the same simple, unaffected 
human being that he had always been. He 
has about as much conceit and self-esteem as 
there is air in one of his own electric globes, 
and the thing he fears most in life is a 'swelled 
head.'" 

He was always glad to talk about his inven- 
tions, but let the conversation sheer to him- 
self rather than to his work and he shut up 
like a clam, becoming shy and diffident to a 
degree. Apropos of this, here is a bit of con- 
versation that once followed an allusion to 
Edison's genius, in his presence. 

"Stuff!" said he emphatically. "Genius is 
simply hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and com- 
mon sense." 

"True enough," agreed the one corrected, 
E. H. Johnson, Edison's manager at that 
time; "but you must admit there is something 
more. Batch here (Mr. Bachelor) and I both 
have those qualifications. But, though we 
knew quite a lot about telephones, and had 
worked hard on 'em, we couldn't invent the 
chalk-receiver, as you did, when our English 
agent cabled for a non-infringement on Gra- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 163 

ham's patent. Then, again, what do you call 
the subdivision of the electric light?" 

"Electric current," substituted Edison. 

"To be sure," agreed Johnson quickly. 
"And who made that distinction? The scien- 
tific world had been struggling with subdi- 
vision for years, using what all considered 
common-sense. And what was the result? 
They said the thing could not be done ! Then 
you come along, look the ground over, and 
start off in exactly the opposite direction. 
Subsequently this proves the right way to turn 
the trick. It seems to me that the procedure 
comes pretty close to Webster's definition of 
genius." 

"Huh!" muttered the Wizard, and at once 
changed the conversation. 

Perhaps no man in all the world made a 
poorer "lion," and yet few have had more illus- 
trious and valuable medals and decorations 
showered upon them. Some years ago a com- 
mittee asked the privilege of showing this col- 
lection at a certain function. "Why-ee," said 
Edison, "I have no objection — none at all, 
provided you think folks would find the gew- 
gaws interesting, which I very much doubt." 



164 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

The committee were sure of this point, how- 
ever, and the case containing the prizes was 
brought. Some of these not being sufficiently 
explanatory, the Wizard was asked to tell with 
what invention they were connected, and, 
though he tried to be obliging, it was soon 
apparent that he had forgotten all about it! 
For the life of him he couldn't tell the circum- 
stances under which he had received at least 
half of the honors, and it was then that Mrs. 
Edison decided to take a hand. She appreci- 
ated and valued the tokens, if her husband did 
not ; and she quietly appropriated the case and 
has since constituted herself its chief custo- 
dian. No doubt but for her watchful care 
most of the medals and decorations would have 
been lost or stolen long ago. 

In keeping with his objection to being lion- 
ized, Edison abhorred banquets and public 
dinners, and for the same reason he was chary 
about taking foreign tours, observing that he 
could not "stand all the kindnesses which are 
showered upon him!" He, however, partici- 
pated in a few events especially unique. One 
of the most remarkable of these being given 
by the American Institute of Electrical Engi- 



THOMAS A. EDISON 165 

neers, on the occasion of Edison's fifty-sev- 
enth birthday and the twenty-fifth anniversary 
of the incandescent electric-light, at which 
time was founded the "Edison medal." Seven 
hundred distinguished guests faced the Wiz- 
ard as he sat, much to his embarrassment, in 
front of a grand display of flags, lighted by 
a brilliant pyramid of fifty-seven electric 
bulbs. Above his head was a little painting of 
his birthplace at Milan, Ohio, decorated with 
the shield of the "Buckeye state," and the 
escutcheons of New Jersey and New York. 
Miniature models of his various inventions, 
made of sugar, stood here and there about the 
table; the menus were elaborate works of art, 
stamped with a bronzed bust of the inventor 
and bearing his autograph ; while the ices were 
frozen in the shape of dainty electric bulbs 
and borne in models of motors, dynamos, 
switchboards, phonographs, and what not, 
typical of the Wizard's marvelous array of 
inventions. Thousands of electric bulbs 
strung along the galleries, and festooned 
about the walls lent a wondrous brilliance to 
the scene. At the inventor's right hand was 
the original duplex sender, the toastmaster, at 



166 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

the receiving end, having one of the early 
quadruplex devices, and between the two went 
the flashes of welcome and Edison's reply. A 
special feature of the evening was the reading 
of many fine messages of congratulation and 
best wishes, received not only from various dis- 
tinguished individuals in America, but from 
England and the continent, and to which the 
toastmaster added the following especially 
well-chosen eulogy: 

"As I am about to propose the health of 
our guest, let me say there should be encour- 
agement in the founding of this medal to-night 
for every struggling, ambitious youth in Amer- 
ica. Let our sons recall and applaud the 
cheery little newsboy at Detroit ; the half-shod, 
half -frozen operator seeking bravely a job 
along the icy pikes of the Central States; the 
embryonic inventor in New York grub-staked 
by a famous Wall Street man for his first 
stock-ticker; the deaf investigator at Menlo 
Park who wreaked novel retaliation on his af- 
fliction by preserving human speech forever 
with his phonograph; the prolific patentee who 
kept the pathway to the Patent Office hot with 
his footsteps for nearly forty years ; the genius, 



THOMAS A. EDISON 167 

our comrade, who took this little crystal bulb 
in his Promethean hand, and with it helped 
to give the world a glorious new light which 
never was before on land or sea — Thomas 
Alva Edison." 

Another banquet which perhaps exceeded 
the one just mentioned in elaborateness was 
that styled a "Magnetic Dinner," and given in 
Edison's honor, at the Hotel Astor, April 15, 
1905. Here the president of the club, acting 
as toastmaster, made an exceedingly unique 
and interesting speech, in which the guests and 
certain Edisonian inventions helped out in a 
pre-arranged tableaux, highly pleasing to the 
inventor when he could forget his own modest 
blushes. 

The entertainment began when Colonel 
Chandler named the quadruplex transmitter. 
At once, to Edison's amazement, a concealed 
instrument began to "dot" and "dash" in a 
marvelously rapid style, while the three hun- 
dred guests sang: 



"When they tell the stories now of the way they used 
to send, 
And the record-breaking work they used to do ; 



168 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

And the way, every day, they would roast the other 
end, 
We are sorry that those happy days are 
through." 

It was the old air of "My Grandfather's 
Clock," a favorite with Edison, and his ex- 
pressive face fairly beamed with delight, as 
he added his own voice in a spontaneous hum 
to the melody. At the next signal came a 
whirring ring of 'phone bells and "Helios," 
both gruff and silvery, while once again the 
whole company broke into song. And so it 
ran down the pathway of the Wizard's inven- 
tions, until finally the incandescent lamp was 
reached, and then suddenly every light in the 
room went out, save the wax candles, which 
had hitherto stood almost unnoted, and once 
more the voices of the company rose : 

"It was just like this in the olden days, 
Which have passed beyond recall; 
In the rare old, fair old golden days 
It was just like this, that's all." 

Abroad, kings, noted scientists, distin- 
guished men of all ranks have united to do 
Edison honor, and while he appreciated their 
efforts, it is certain that he would have been 



THOMAS A. EDISON 169 

far better pleased with less pomp and cere- 
mony. Returning from one of these tours, he 
is thus credited with describing his days in 
Paris : 

"Dinners, dinners, dinners, all the time! 
But in spite of them all, they did not get me 
to speak. Once I got Chauncey Depew to 
make a speech for me, and I got Reid, our 
Minister there, to make three or four. I could 
never get used to so many dinners. At noon 
I would sit down to what they called dejeuner. 
That would last until nearly three o'clock, and 
a few hours later would come a big dinner. It 
was terrible. I looked down from the Eiffel 
Tower (where he himself was the guest of 
honor) on the biggest dinner I ever saw, given 
by the Municipality of Paris. I saw 8900 peo- 
ple eating at one time. Now I feel I must 
starve for a few months in order to get straight 
again after all those dinners. I wonder they 
didn't kill me." 

Simple food, moderately eaten, was ever his 
rule, and he kept an eye on the scales. If he 
found himself losing or gaming in flesh, he 
promptly increased or decreased the food sup- 
ply. Thus for nearly a quarter of a century, 



170 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

his weight stood approximately at 175 
pounds, and the same tailor made his modest 
suits without change from the measurements 
furnished him years before. Edison cared little 
for meat, but was "long" on fruit and pie. He 
regarded as a necessity his after meals' cup of 
coffee and a good cigar — "a good working 
stimulant," he called them. As for cigarettes, 
"they are deadly," said he. "It is not the to- 
bacco, it is the acrolein produced by the burn- 
ing paper that does the harm. We sometimes 
develop acrolein in the laboratory in our ex- 
periments with glycerine. I can hardly exag- 
gerate its dangerous nature." 

The Wizard was as chary of sleep as of 
food. Six hours out the twenty-four was 
enough. How could he stand it? Here is his 
own answer: "Easily enough, because I am 
vitally interested in what I do. I don't live 
in the past." (A happy way of saying that 
he did not worry.) "I am living for to-day 
and to-morrow. I am interested in every de- 
partment of science, art and manufacture. I 
read all the time on astronomy, chemistry, 
biology, physics, music, metaphysics, mechan- 
ics, and other branches, in fact, all things that 



THOMAS A. EDISON 171 

are making for progress in the world. I get 
all the proceedings of the scientific societies, 
the principal scientific and trade journals, and 
read them. I also read some theatrical and 
sporting papers and a lot of similar publica- 
tions, for I like to know what is going on. In 
this way I keep up to date, and live in a great, 
moving world of my own, and, what's more, 
I enjoy every minute of it." 

And here, in these few brief sentences, is 
contained the reason why, when it was seen 
that our country would be drawn into the 
World War, Secretary Daniels turned to an 
old white-haired man out in Orange, New 
Jersey, — to Thomas A. Edison. And this is 
why that to this man, "seventy years young," 
must be credited perhaps the biggest "bit" 
done by any one man for the service of his 
country throughout the whole period of the 
war — and that freely, gladly, without thought 
of any further fame or reward. Putting aside 
his own business affairs and giving up his be- 
loved experiments and investigations, the Wiz- 
ard turned single-heartedly to the call, accept- 
ing the office of president of the Naval Con- 
sulting Board, with the provision that he be 



172 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

intrusted with scientific investigation only. 
Forty inventions, in the year and a half of 
war, is the almost incredible total that he 
and his assistants worked out for the solution 
of the mechanical problems at sea. The record 
of it all would make an interesting book in 
itself. Again Edison had fared forth into 
practically an unknown field: he was essen- 
tially a landsman ; all his work so far had been 
for the furtherance of progress on shore. But 
with his usual self-confidence he did not for a 
moment entertain any doubts of his ability in 
this new field. His triumphs, accomplished at 
an age when most men have retired to the 
chimney-corner, are more wonderful than if 
he had indeed, as some credulous persons ex- 
pected, invented a marvelous electrical ma- 
chine to annihilate at one stroke the armies of 
our enemies. It is the record of a man of vigor 
and activity, used to hard work and hard 
thinking, and to depending with faith and 
sureness on his own resourcefulness, — a man 
who although the total of his gifts to the world 
was already very great, still found his keenest 
pleasure in meeting the vital problems of his 
fellowmen. 



XII 

EDISON IN HIS HOME 

Surprising as it may seem, Edison was a 
particularly domestic man. He retired to his 
own home as to a castle when the hours at the 
laboratory were over. It required consider- 
able diplomacy to lure him forth again for the 
evening, and no matter how important the en- 
gagement he positively refused to don a dress 
suit. As his telegrapher friends were once 
fond of saying, Edison, whatever else he might 
be, was no "dude"; clothes simply failed to 
interest him, and he was democratic enough to 
follow his own tastes. In deference to his 
wife and family, he finally laid aside the old 
linen duster, the "masculine Mother Hub- 
bard," which was once his favorite working 
garb, and his clothing became less noticeable 
for hard usage. But he was always, as an 
aggrieved assistant once declared, "The poor- 
est man at dressing that ever lived, and 
doesn't care what he wears, save that he will 

173 



174 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

have spotless linen and an old-fashioned white 
string tie." 

Edison was twice married. His first wife, 
Miss Mary E. Stilwell, was an intelligent, 
sweet-tempered girl, one of his working force 
at Newark and well-loved by all. She came 
to him shortly after the death of his mother, 
and the new home was presently set up in 
"The Homestead" at Menlo Park, and here 
were born their three children, Mary Estelle 
and Thomas Alva Edison Jr., — lovingly nick- 
named by their father and the staff as "Dot" 
and "Dash" — and William Leslie, and here, 
after her marriage and the family's removal 
to Orange, Mary or "Marion Estelle," made 
her home for some time before going to live in 
Germany. The wife and mother died in 
1884, at the most intensely busy period of Edi- 
son's career, and for weeks and months there- 
after his workshop and his chemical laboratory 
held him as in a vise. Locked in, he worked 
for sixty hours or more at a stretch, eating and 
sleeping only when tired Nature refused 
longer to withstand the strain. 

Then Providence interfered. Business 
called Edison to Akron, Ohio, to the home of 




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THOMAS A. EDISON 175 

Lewis Miller, the pioneer inventor of the then 
famous Miller harvesting and threshing ma- 
chinery, a millionaire and a man of culture, 
being the founder of the present Chautauqua 
movement. And here Edison met the daugh- 
ter, Miss Mina, a young and beautiful girl, 
who was deeply interested in all that inter- 
ested her father, and who had happily given 
him more than one practically helpful idea as 
they planned and worked together at the shop. 
It was a case of love at first sight, and the two 
were married within a year. Now, Edison's 
hermit-days were over. No longer could he 
busy himself in work "up to his eyes" and stay 
hidden. Mrs. Edison took upon herself the 
wife's part of keeping her illustrious husband 
happy, healthy, and "human." She insisted 
that he have a regular hour for lunch, and 
leave the laboratory at a certain time in the 
evening, and she held her point so gracefully 
and tactfully that the Wizard, though he 
laughingly dubbed her a nuisance, gave in, and 
added quite truthfully that he was glad to 
have some one to take care of him. Of course, 
there have been lapses of "working-fever," but 
it is doubtful if the Wizard, as the years went 



176 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

by, would have been able to accomplish so 
much had not his wife staunchly insisted on 
system and regularity, and kept the household 
machinery running with a beautiful precision 
which made their home a place of deep and 
abiding peace. 

An attractive home, indeed, is that of the 
Edisons, one of the most beautiful in all New 
Jersey. The house is of the style known as 
Queen Anne, handsomely fashioned of brick 
and wood. The wide porch is covered with 
purple wistaria, and fairly radiates comfort 
and repose. Inside is the cozy cheer and 
beauty of the old English country house. 
Glenmont, it is called, and the location is in 
Llewellyn Park, at the foot of the Orange 
Mountain. Edison was so fortunate as to 
purchase the beautiful estate complete, includ- 
ing the blooded stock in pasture and stables, 
furniture, library, conservatories, and artistic 
treasures which had taken ten years to col- 
lect, from the former owner, just after his sec- 
ond marriage. 

"Of course it is much too nice for me," he 
said, in showing his newly-purchased paradise 
to a friend, "but it is not half nice enough for 



THOMAS A. EDISON 177 

the little wife!" Mrs. Edison, however, was 
as well pleased as he, and quietly set about cer- 
tain additions divined from her own capable 
sense of beauty and fitness, until the whole 
place was presently eloquent of matchless 
taste and skilful management — Edisonian, in 
short. 

Mr. Edison's scientific library, one of the 
most exhaustive to be found anywhere, is kept 
at the laboratory within easy access of all. 
And as a rule he left such books there. Mrs. 
Edison helped him, early in their first days 
together, to an understanding that the mind 
profits by a little leisure. Edison was strug- 
gling with a pretty hard problem — a problem 
that insisted on going home with him, when 
his wife came for him to take their usual little 
before-dinner drive. Finally it drove him to 
the library, and there he walked back and 
forth, up and down, round and round, until 
his unrest brought Mrs. Edison to his aid. 
Catching up a book, she stopped before her 
husband. 

"Have you read this?" she asked, quietly. 

Mr. Edison, always courteous, paused and 
took the book. "The Count of Monte Cristo/* 



178 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

he said, reading the title. "No; is it good?" 

Mrs. Edison enthusiastically declared that 
it was a fine story, and she was sure he would 
enjoy it. 

"Well," smiled Edison, "I guess I'll start 
it right away." 

And forthwith he settled himself comfort- 
ably, and soon became so absorbed in the fas- 
cinating tale that he read straight on through 
the night, reaching the last word just as the 
morning sun peeped in at the window. Then 
he fared forth to the laboratory. He did not 
return to lunch, but at night he declared that 
the Count of Monte Cristo was a mighty fine 
fellow, he had certainly helped him to crack 
an exceedingly hard nut. 

Edison liked detective stories, of the kind 
that "wasted no time getting down to busi- 
ness." He liked to jump into an intricate plot 
on the first page and to find the tale unfolding 
with no abatement of interest until the climax 
was reached. Emile Gaboriau, the French 
novelist, who produced M. Lecoq, a pioneer 
Sherlock Holmes, never failed to interest him, 
and he was a sincere mourner when this king 
of detective-story writers died. Edgar Allan 



THOMAS A. EDISON 17? 

Poe, too, was a favorite. He read over and 
over the adventurous tales of Flammarion and 
Jules Verne, and many of the masterpieces of 
Scott, Dumas, Hawthorne, Dickens; and Rus- 
kin. Dante also gave him many delightful 
hours, and in one of the library windows is a 
sash of stained glass, designed by Edison him- 
self, from which the head of the great Italian 
writer shines down in a wonderfully solemn 
and realistic manner. A great fireplace takes 
up one side of this charming room, and there 
are all manner of cozy nooks and corners here 
and there where one may pass delightful hours. 

All in all, Edison's home and family life 
was an ideal one, and in the fullest measure 
he reaped a rich reward in happiness and con- 
tentment. In his closing years he "quit the 
inventing business," but he still had a "thou- 
sand and one irons in the fire." 

In the evening of his life, standing on the 
threshold of a new, mysterious, fascinating and 
so far unfathomable field, Edison toiled on a 
final invention — an apparatus designed to en- 
able those who have left this earth to communi- 
cate with those who remain ! 

Something of the nature of this instrument 



180 FAMOUS AMERICANS 

and the theories he has evolved regarding life 
have been given to interviewers, and they are 
interesting in being what we would expect 
from the Wizard of Electricity, who affirmed 
that neither he nor any other human being 
knew one-billionth part of what is likely to be 
known about electricity ages hence, that we 
must give a brief glimpse of them here, even 
though Edison warned his interviewers: 
"Mind you, I am promising no results. All 
I'm saying is that if those who have 'passed 
on' are so circumstanced that they can or want 
to communicate with us, my instrument will 
make it possible. And, should such a thing 
take place, there is no doubt but that we would 
be brought an important step nearer the foun- 
tain-head of all knowledge, nearer the Intelli- 
gence which directs all." 

Scientists tell us that our bodies change once 
in every seven years, that is, that no particle 
that is in the make-up of our bodies at the be- 
ginning of one seven-year period remains at 
its end. "We are creatures of environment," 
says the proverb. And from these two points 
Edison made an interesting deduction. Our 
bodies, according to him, are made up of 



THOMAS A. EDISON 181 

myriads of small individuals — "life units" — so 
tiny that a thousand of them gathered to- 
gether would still be invisible to the highest 
power microscope. These life units work in 
squads, or "swarms," as Edison preferred to 
call them, and he figured that there are lead- 
ers among them, just as among humans, which 
do the thinking and directing. Naturally cer- 
tain conditions make it impossible for certain 
swarms to exist. 

We have much to learn regarding life and 
death. And, says Edison, "The more we 
learn, the more we understand that there is life 
in things we have been accustomed to call life- 
less." As an example, he cites the parts of 
a chicken that went on living at the Rocke- 
feller Medical Institute long after the chicken 
of which they once formed a part had died. 

All of the higher swarms are deathless, Edi- 
son concluded. "When we die, these swarms 
of units, like swarms of bees, so to speak, be- 
take themselves elsewhere, and go on func- 
tioning in some other form of environment." 

His theory of communicating with the spirit 
is based upon the supposition that the swarm 
we call "personality" exists after death in a 



182 THOMAS A. EDISON 

hereafter such as we all love to think about 
and imagine. "And if it does," he affirmed, 
"then it is strictly logical and scientific to as- 
sume that it retains memory, intellect, and 
other faculties and knowledge that we acquire 
on earth. This being true, it is reasonable to 
conclude that those who leave this earth would 
like to communicate with those they have left 
here. ~No doubt, however, the degree of mate- 
rial or physical power which they possess must 
be very slight. Accordingly, the thing to do 
is to furnish the best conceivable means to 
make it easy for them to open up communica- 
tion with us, and then see what happens." 
The avenue offered will, of course, be elec- 
trical. 

With this vision of the other world, we must 
conclude the life story of a man who, perhaps 
of all others who have ever lived, has made us 
realize most fully the infinite powers accorded 
to all mankind. 









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